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THE WEBSTER STATUE. 



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INAUGURATION 



STATUE 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 



SEPTEMBER 17, 1859. 



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BOSTON: 

GEO. C. RAND AND AVERY, CITY PRINTERS. 

NO. 3 CORN HI I- L. 

1859. 



• iH". 



IN EXCHANGE 

4 



1 






P R E L 1 M 1 X A RY PROCEEDINGS 



A meeting of the citizens of Boston was held in Faneuil Hull on the 27th of Octo- 
ber, 1852, "of all persons desirous of consulting together and considering what 
memorial of the services of Daniel Webster is. due to themselves and the country.* 
His Honor Benjamin Seaver presided at this meeting, and addresses were made by the 
Mayor, by the Hon. George S. Hillard and Hon. Edward Everett. A series of resolutions 
was adopted on motion of John T. Heard, Esq., one of which provided that a " Com- 
mittee of one hundred persons be appointed by the chair, to be selected in such a 
manner as to represent the citizens of every pursuit, calling, and party, whose duty it 
shall be to take such measures as may be deemed expedient, to provide, by the coop- 
eration of the whole community, a permanent memorial of our illustrious and lamented 
fellow-citizen." 

The following persons were, by the Mayor, named of this Committee : 



Thos. H. Perkins. 
George Ticknor, 
Edward Everett, 
Nathan Appleton, 
Abbott Lawrence, 
Benj. Seaver, 
Amos Lawrence, 
Francis C. Gray, 
Samuel Lawrence, 
R. G. Shaw, 
John T. Heard, 
Franklin Haven, 
Chas. G. Greene, 
John C. Warren, 
John E. Thayer, 
Thos. W. Ward, 
John A. Lowell, 
Samuel D. Bradford, 
Robert B. Storer, 
Peter Harvey, 
Enoch Train, 
John M. Forbes, 
Levi A. Dowley, 
Moses Williams, 
Albert Fearing, 
L. W. Tappan, 
Henry K. Horton, 
Samuel T. Dana, 
W. W. Greenough, 
Daniel Safford, 
John P. Thorndike, 
William Hayden, 
George T. Curtis, 
Jacob 



John H. Pearson, 
Samuel Hooper, 
John P. Ober, 
Vernon Brown, 
J. Thos. Stevenson, 
C. P. Curtis, 
Charles J. Hendee. 
Jas. K. Mills, 
Francis C. Lowell, 
E. F. Ravmond, 
W. H. Larned, 
W. C. Barstow, 
S. C. Allen, 
Julius A. Palmer, 
John C. Tucker, 
James Cheever, 
Geo. B. Upton, 
Geo. R. Sampson. 
William Sturgis, 
Ozias Goodwin, 
Paras Stevens, 
H. J. Gardner, 
C. C. Felton, 
George T. Lyman, 
H. M. Holbrook, 
William T. Eustis, 
Thomas J. Whittemore, 
William Almy, 
Joseph Packard, 
N. A. Thompson, 
Charles Lark in, 
William Thomas, 
John Jeffries, 
Sleeper, Amos A. I 



Benjamin Loring, 
Nathan Hale, 
Samuel A. Eliot, 
William Appleton. 
William Amory, 
Charles H. Mills, 
A. Hemmenway, 
Francis Skinner, 
Charles L. Woodbury. 
Samuel Henshaw, 
Benjamin F. Hallett. 
Samuel Kettelle. 
C. R. Ransom, 
George Peabody, 
Thomas B. Wales, 
Samuel Whitwell, 
P. W. Chandler, 
John W. Trull, 
James Whiting, 
Eliphalet Jones, 
Silas Pierce, 
George W. Crockett. 
Andrew Carney, 
H. H. Hunnewell, 
James Lawrence, 
J. W. James, 
Jonas Chickering. 
Peter Dunbar, 
Arthur Pickering. 
Henry Crocker, 
Benjamin Smith, 
Ezra ForristaU, 
Thomas B. Curtis. 
,awrence. 



•Mr. Webster died at Marshfield on the 24th October, 1862. 



(') 



A meeting of the General Committee of one hundred was held in the City Hall on 
the 1st of November, and in pursuance of a plan of organization adopted by them, 
an "Executive Committee of ten" was appointed "to report to the General 
Committee what memorial they recommend, and to arrange the details of its execu- 
tion." This Committee consisted of the following persons, viz: 

George Ticknor, J. Thomas Stevenson, William Anion, 

William Appleton, John T. Heard, George W. Crockett, 

Edward Everett, Charles P. Curtis. Samuel Lawrence, 

C. C. Felton. 

Messrs. G. Howland Shaw of Boston, Albert H. Nelson of Wobum, and Edward A. 
Newton of Pittsfield, were unanimously elected members of the Committee of one 
hundred, to fill the vacancies occasioned by the deaths of Messrs. R. G. Shaw and 
Amos Lawrence, and the resignation of Mr. Benjamin Loring of Boston. 

Liberal subscriptions having been made throughout the community to effect the 
proposed object, a meeting of the Executive Committee of ten was held on the 5th 
of May, 1853, at which Messrs. Everett, Ticknor, and Amory were appointed a sub- 
committee to consider and report what kind of monument ought to be erected in 
honor of Mr. Webster. On the 23d of May, Mr. Everett made a report in favor of a 
statue, to be executed by some distinguished American artist, and to be set up in the 
open air in the City of Boston. This report was unanimously accepted by the Exec- 
utive Committee, and ordered to be referred to the Committee of one hundred for 
their approval. 

The Committee of one hundred met on the 30th of May, and the report of the 
Executive Committee in favor of a statue was unanimously adopted, and the Execu- 
tive Committee were directed to carry it into effect. A correspondence was immedi- 
ately opened by the sub-committee with Mr. Powers, and in the month of October, 
1853, a contract was entered into with him, to execute a Statue of Mr. Webster in 
bronze, eight feet high, for the sum of twelve thousand dollars. The sub- committee 
were led to select Mr. Powers as the artist, not merely on the ground of his distin- 
guished talent in modelling from life, but because he had enjoyed the opportunity of 
studying the face and person of Mr. Webster, at the meridian of his years, during a 
residence of two or three weeks at Marshfield, and had, at that time, executed a bust 
of him. 

The statue was completed and shipped from Leghorn in the autvrmn of 1857, but 
the vessel was lost at sea. The statue was fully insured for twelve thousand dollars. 
at the office of the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company, New York, and this sum, 
minus the premium, was promptly paid. As soon as the loss of the vessel was ascer- 
tained, a duplicate of the statue was ordered by the unanimous direction of the Ex- 
ecutive Committee, for seven thousand dollars, and the work was received in good 
order in Boston, on the 20th of January last. It was, by the kindness of the Trustees 
of the Boston Athena-um, temporarily placed in the vestibule of that Institution, but 
unfortunately at an elevation and in a light (the premises not admitting better) where 
it was seen to great disadvantage. 

At a meeting of the Executive Committee on the 12th February, 1859, it was voted 
that a meeting of the General Committee of one hundred be called, to decide on the 
permanent location of the statue, and that the Executive Committee recommend to 
the Committee of one hundred that it be placed in the State House grounds, if per- 
mission can be obtained from the Legislature. 



The Committee of one hundred met on the 17th of February, and a report was 
submitted from the Executive Committee by its Chairman (Mr. Everett,) embodying 
the following resolution: 

"Resolved, That the Executive Committee be, and they are hereby authorized and 
directed to make application, through His Excellency the Governor, to the Legislature 
of the Commonwealth, for permission to set up the statue of Mr. Webster on some 
suitable spot within the State House grounds, at the expense of the 'Webster Memo- 
rial Fund ; ' and, in case the application be granted, that the said committee be author- 
ized and directed to make all suitable arrangements to carry the same into effect, 
provided the expense of the same shall not exceed the amount of funds in the hands 
of the Committee." 

The report embodying the foregoing resolution was accepted without a division. 

The following vacancies were reported in the General Committee, occasioned by 
the deaths of Messrs. Thomas H. Perkins, Abbott Lawrence, Francis C. Gray, J. C. 
Warren, M. D., John E. Thayer, Thomas W. Ward, Thomas B. Wales, Jonas dick- 
ering, Daniel Safford; and they were filled, respectively, by the election of Messrs. 
Thomas H. Perkins, T. Bigelow Lawrence, William Gray, J. Mason Warren, M. D., 
Nathaniel Thayer, Samuel G. Ward, Thomas B. Wales, Thomas E. Chickering, and 
Daniel Safford. 

In pursuance of the instructions of the Committee of one hundred, the following 
letter was addressed to the Governor of the Commonwealth : 



Boston, 19th February, 1859. 

Sir: — A bronze statue eight feet in height, of Daniel Webster, executed by Powers, 
a distinguished American artist, has lately been received in this city. It is designed 
to be placed upon a pedestal of about the same height. By direction of the Execu- 
tive Committee of the "Webster Memorial," I beg leave to transmit to your Excel- 
lency a certified copy of a resolution adopted on the 17th instant, at a meeting of the 
General Committee of one hundred, having charge of the statue, and through you to 
make respectful application to the Legislature of the Commonwealth for permission, 
at the expense of the " Webster Memorial Fund," to place the statue on some suitable 
spot within the State House grounds. 

I have the honor to be, on behalf of the Executive Committee, with high con- 
sideration, Your Excellency's obedient servant, 

EDWARD EVERETT. 
His Excellency Nathaniel P. Banks. 



This letter was communicated to the House of Representatives by the Governor, in 
the following message : 

Executive Department, Council Chamber, i 
Boston, March 10, 1859. 

To the Speaker of the Bouse of Representatives: — 

Sir, — I have the honor to transmit to the House of Representatives, for the use of 
the Legislature, a communication from the Honorable Edward Everett, inclosing a 
certified copy of resolutions adopted at a meeting of the general committee having in 
charge the statue of Mr. Webster, and requesting permission of the Legislature to 
place the statue, at the expense of the Webster Memorial Fund, on some suitable spot 
within the State House grounds, under such regulations as in the judgment of the 



Legislature may be deemed expedient, with reference to the nature of the grounds 
and the character of the statue. 

I recommend that the request of the general committee of the friends of Mr. Web- 
ster be granted. Mr. Webster gave to the service of the Commonwealth the best 
wars of his life. Entering the public councils in L820, he devoted himself to public 
employments in the constitutional and legislative assemblies of this State, in both 
Houses of Congress, and in the Cabinet, until the closing hours of his life. 

His eloquence, superior attainments and unsurpassed intellectual power, contributed 
in an eminent degree to mark the period of his public service as one of the most inter- 
estim: and important that has occurred since the adoption of the Constitution. 

If permission to place the statue on some suitable spot within the State House 
grounds shall be granted, it is probable that other works of art commemorating the 
services of distinguished citizens of the Commonwealth will speedily be created, and 
thus the Legislature will be enabled, without public expense, by a proper exercise of 
its power, to add to the attractive beauties of the Capitol, to elevate the public taste 
in works of art, and to strengthen the influences which appeal directly to the patriot- 
ism of the people. 

1 ' NATHANIEL P. BANKS. 



This message was referred to the appropriate committees of the two Houses, and 
on their report, permission was unanimously granted, to erect the statue in the State 
House grounds. 

A spot in front of the eastern wing of the State House having been selected by a 
sub-committee of the Executive Committee, acting in concurrence with the commis- 
sioners on the part of the Commonwealth, the 17th day of September, the anniversary 
of the City of Boston, was appointed for the inauguration of the statue. The Mayor 
of the city having presided at the meeting of the citizens in Faneuil Hall, at which 
the proceedings were initiated in 1852, and the City Council having taken measures 
to assist in the inauguration of the first statue, the following letter was addressed to 
His Honor the Mayor, inviting the cooperation of the City Government on the present 
occasion: 



Boston, July 25, 1859. 

Dear Sik: — On the 17th of September, 1857, a resolution passed the City Council 
appointing a joint committee "to inquire if any action is expedient on the part of the 
City in its corporate capacity, in view of the proposed inauguration of a statue of 
the" late Daniel Webster about to be erected in this city." The loss of the statue at 
sea and the time required to procure a duplicate have caused delay in its erection; 
but I have been directed by the Committee having in charge the arrangements for 
that purpose, to acquaint you that they have appointed the 17th of September next 
for the erection of the statue in the State House grounds, -the consent of the two 
Houses having been granted at the late session of the Legislature. 

I am further directed by the Committee to acquaint you that the attendance and 
cooperation of the Mayor and the City Council in the ceremonial of the day will 
afford them great satisfaction. 

I have the honor to be, on behalf of the Committee, most respectfully yours, 

EDWARD EVERETT. 
His Honor !■'. \V. Lincoln, Jr., Mayor of the City of Boston. 



This letter was transmitted by the Mayor to the City Council in the following 
message : 

To the Honorable (he City Council: 

I transmit the following communication from the Hon. Edward Everett, respecting 
the proposed inauguration of the statue of the late Daniel Webster. It is proposed 
that the services shall take place on the seventeenth of September, the anniversary of 
the settlement of Boston and of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. 

The Committee of citizens who have in charge the arrangements for the occasion, 
desire the cooperation of the City Government, and I would respectfully suggest the 
appointment of a committee from your own body to confer with them on the subject. 

F. W. LINCOLN, Jr., Mayor. 
Whereupon the following proceedings were had: 

In Common Council, July 28, 1859. 
Read and referred to Messrs. Tyler, Bayley, Jones, Beal, and Clapp, with such as 
the Board of Aldermen may join, to confer with the Committee of Citizens referred 
to in the within communication, and to take such measures as they may deem neces- 
sarv. Sent up for concurrence. 

J. P. BRADLEE, President. 

In Board of Aldermen, August 1, 1859. 
Concurred; and Aldermen Clapp, Dennie, and Allen were joined. 

SILAS PEIRCE, Chairman. 

The following correspondence was also had with the Governor of the Common- 
wealth : 

Boston, Aug. 30, 1859. 

Dear Sir: — Referring to the letter which I had the honor to address to you on the 
25th ult., I beg leave to state, that it is proposed by the Committee charged with the 
arrangements for the erection of the Webster statue, on the 17th of September, that 
it should, on behalf of the subscribers to the Webster Memorial, be presented in a 
short address, by Prof. Felton, to His Honor the Mayor of Boston, of which Mr. 
Webster was for so long a time an honored citizen, and that the Mayor, in like 
manner, should present it to Your Excellency as the Representative of the Common- 
wealth, in whose public grounds, under a resolution of the two Houses of the Legis- 
lature, the Statue is to be set up, to be accepted by you on their behalf. 

It would afford the Committee the highest satisfaction, should you be pleased to 
take the part in the ceremonial thus indicated. 

I remain, dear sir, with great respect, 

Very truly yours, 

EDWARD EVERETT. 

Boston, August 30, 1859. 
Dear Sir: — I received this morning your note of this date, setting forth the 
arrangements proposed for the inauguration of the Statue of Mr. Webster, and the 
part assigned me, in the ceremony. 

It gives me pleasure to assure you that the arrangements are in all respects agree- 
able, and that I shall cheerfully undertake the duties assigned to me, on the part of 
the Government of the Commonwealth. 

Very respectfully, 

Your obedient servant, 

2 XATH'L P. BANKS. 



10 



Tin' procuring of the pedestal and tlio general charge of erecting the statue were 
committed to S. Greely Curtis, Esq. The pedestal is of beautiful New Hampshire 
granite, and is executed from drawings by Mr. Curtis, for which a sketch was fur- 
nished by Mr. Powers. Platforms were thrown over the areas in front of both wings 
of the State House, and an elevated stage erected in the central space between them, 
at the expense of the memorial fund. The weather proving very unfavorable on the 
17th of September, it became necessary to perform the dedicatory exercises in the 
.Music Hall. The organization of the procession and the other arrangements of the 
day took place under the auspices of the City Council. General John S. Tyler 
officiated as Chief Marshal, it being the third time of his occupying this position on 
occasions directly connected with the name of Webster, viz: Mr. Webster's Reception 
Home, July 0th, 1852; the Webster Obsequies, Nov. 2d, 1852; and the present occa- 
sion. The same gentlemen wdio assisted on these memorable days as Aids and Mar- 
shals were again invited to participate, and nearly all accepted the invitation. The 
list of names is as follows: 



Fred. W. Lincoln, 
Lewis W. Tappan, 
W. W. Clapp, Jr. 



AIDS. 

Jos. L. Henshaw, 
George B. Upton, 
N. A. Thompson, 



Thos. E. Chickering, 

M. G. Cobb, 

E. Webster Pike. 



Peter Butler, Jr., 
Granville Mears, 
Otis Kimball, 
E. F. Hall, 
Dudley H. Bayley, 
P. I. Burbank, 
1). F. McGilvray, 
J. Fred. Marsh, 
John A. Cummings, 



MARSHALS. 

Adolphus Davis, 

G. S. Curtis, 

J. Russell Spalding, 

C. H. Dudley, 

J. Tisdale Bradlee, 
Sidney Rartlett, Jr., 

D. B. Hooper, 
C. W. Frost, 
John M. Wright, 



H. D. Child, 
J. M. Wightman, 
C. H. Appleton, 
Ives G. Bates, 
J. H. Sleeper, 
C. F. Lougee, 
S. A. Bradbury, 
George S. Walker, 
L. B. Barnes, 



W. S. Timelier, 



E. G. Tucker. 



The military escort duties were performed by the Second Battalion of Infantry, 
First Division of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, under the command of Major C. 
(). Rogers. At about half-past one P. M. the Legislature, conducted by Mr. Morissey 
the Sergeant-at-Arms, formed in procession in the Doric Hall at the State House, and 
repaired under the escort of Major Rogers' battalion to the Music Hall. They were 
soon followed by the civic procession from the City Hall, under the same escort. The 
Music Hall, of which the galleries had been filled with ladies at an earlier hour, was 
now thrown open to the public, and was soon crowded to its utmost capacity. 1'pon 
the platform were seated the Committee of one hundred, the subscribers to the Statue, 
Rev. S. K. Lothrop, chaplain for the occasion, and invited guests. Among the latter 
were ex-President Pierce, Gov. [chabod Goodwin, of New Hampshire, Hon. Francis 
Granger, of New York, ex-Postmaster-General, Capt. Hudson, U. S. N., ex-Gov. Fish, 
of New York, Daniel W. Gouch, M. C. elect, Hon. Linus B. Comins, Hon. Anson Bur- 
lingame, Hon. Alexander H. Rice, Judges Lord, Wells and Russell, of the Superior 
Court, Hon. Chas. A. Phelps, President of the Mass. Senate, Hon. Chas. Hale, 
Speaker of the House, J. Thos. Stevenson, Esq., G. T. Curtis, Esq., J. W. Paige, Esq., 
J. P. Bradlee, Esq., President of the Common Council, Col. John T. Heard, Fletcher 
Webster, Esq., Peter Harvey, Esq., and many others. 



SERVICES AT THE MUSIC HALL. 



At precisely three o'clock, Gen. John S. Tyler, Chief Marshal of the day, intro- 
duced Rev. Mr. Lothrop, who offered the following appropriate prayer: 

PRAYER. 

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we recognize and adore Thee before whom we 
are nothing, and without whom we can do nothing. In dependence upon Thee is all our 
strength ; in the beamings of Thy glory is all our light, in prostrating our wills to Thy 
most holy will is our highest elevation. We thank Thee that Thou hast created man 
in Thine own image, that the breath of Thine inspiration endoweth him with under- 
standing, that the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, calleth him to glory, 
honor, and immortality. AVe thank Thee for all the great and good, the wise and 
useful, the men of mighty minds and noble hearts, whom Thou hast raised up, and dost 
raise up in all ages, in all lands, and with every generation, to shine as lights in the 
world, and to be guides and leaders in the great march of humanity. We thank Thee 
especially for Thy mercies to us of this nation, in that from the hour that our Fathers 
sought an asylum on these shores, all through our history, and with every generation, 
Thou hast never left us without those who were wise in council, persevering in effort, 
steadfast in purpose, devoted in patriotism, strong in faith, — men whose virtues have 
not been forgotten, whose names cannot perish, whose glory liveth forever. And now, 
O God ! that we are met together to do honor to the memory of one of our illustrious 
dead, whose fame filled the nation and covered the earth, by setting up his image here 
among us, that it may speak to the eye, and utter lessons that shall reach the ear of the 
heart, we devoutly implore Thy blessing upon the work of our hands and the purpose 
of our souls. 

O thou gracious God, whose inspiration giveth genius, whose wisdom imparteth 
understanding, we thank Thee that Thou didst give us the great and strong man whom 
we here commemorate, to be for so many years a guiding light in our national councils. 
We recall with gratitude all his eminent and varied services to his country ; and we 
pray that all that was wise, comprehensive, and patriotic in him, as a statesman, all 
that was just, profound, and true in his eloquent utterances as an orator, all that was 
good, noble, Christian in his life and character as a man, may live in our memories, and 
in the memories of those who come after us ; and may his statue, now placed within the 
shadow of the Capitol, entrusted to the guardianship of the State, speak to all beholders 
with something of the power of his living presence, and be to them a quickening inspi- 
ration and incentive to walk in the path of patriotism, usefulness, and honor. We ask 
Thy blessing upon those who are to speak to us in the further services of this occasion, 
that their words may be " like apples of gold in pictures of silver," giving us wisdom 
and strength. Let thy benediction be upon our city, upon its government, and upon all 
its interests ; upon this ancient Commonwealth, upon its Chief Magistrate, and upon 
all those charged with the enactment of its laws and the promotion of its welfare ; upon 
the President of these United States, and all called to offices of trust and authority 
among us. Let Thy favor abide with our people everywhere, that they may BO serve 
Thee and be obedient unto Christ, thai Hie righteousness that cxalteth a nation shall 
more and more prevail, and the blessing of the Lord our God be upon us as it was upon 
our fathers. 

We offer our prayer in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, as whose disciples we pray. 
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will 
be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive ub our 
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead lis not into temptation, 
but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and tbe power and the glory for ever 
and ever. Amen. 



12 



Professor Felton was then introduced, and delivered the following address of 
presentation, on behalf of the Committee of one hundred: 

Mr. Mayor: — It has been the custom of the 
most civilized nations, to erect bronze and marble 
statues in commemoration of their great men. There 
is a fond desire in the hearts of the living to prolong 
the memory, by perpetuating the form and linea- 
ments, of those who have been distinguished in the 
service of God and man; and when a mourning 
nation has followed an illustrious citizen or ruler 
to the tomb, and time has softened down the first 
vehemence of grief, the hand of genius is employed 
to clothe his mortal semblance in the immortality 

of art. 

After the death of Demosthenes, on the little 
island of Calaureia, which looks over from the oppo- 
site coast of the classic sea that washes his native 
Attica, the Athenian people passed a decree to set 
up in the place of greatest public resort, a bronze 
statue of that martyr to liberty, whose fame has 
filled the world for more than twenty centuries. 
The ancient traveller, as he wandered through the 
Agora, surveyed that masterly work of art, stand- 
ing in front of the Acropolis, and in sight of the 
Bema, whence his resistless eloquence had so often 

" fulmined over Greece, 
To Maeedon and Artaxerxes' throne." 



13 



While contemplating the wonderful force and beauty 
of expression the sculptor had stamped on brow 
and feature, he recalled the triumphs of the great 
statesman's life, his civil courage, his lofty virtues, 
his devotion to the welfare and honor of his country, 
and his tragic death. The same classic sea still 
sings his requiem below the ruined temple of Nep- 
tune, where he died. 

Our great citizen, Mr. Mayor, like that illustrious 
ancient, consecrated his peerless genius and his 
mighty eloquence, his civil courage and his manly 
virtues, to the service of his country, and died in 
the midst of public cares. In silence and in sorrow 
we followed all that was mortal of Daniel Webster 
to his last resting-place, and saw him laid in the bosom 
of the sacred earth at Marshfield. He sleeps with 
Pilgrim and kindred dust, by the broad ocean; and 
the broad ocean he loved so well shall sing his 
requiem for ever. 

Desirous to give a durable expression to their 
sense of his public greatness and of his private 
virtues ; desirous, also, to transmit to the coming 
ages a monument that shall represent to them the 
dignity of personal bearing with which he moved 
among his contemporaries, 

A combination and a form indeed, 

Where every pod did seem to set his seal, 

And mve the world assurance of a man. — 



14 



his fellow-citizens have thought proper to cause a 
statue of heroic size to be made by a most distin- 
guished American sculptor. 

The Committee charged with the honorable duty 
of executing their wishes, have now finished the 
grateful task, and with the consent of the public 
authorities, have placed the statue here — here, on 
the Capitol of Massachusetts, that it may stand, like 
a sentinel guarding the sanctuary of the Common- 
wealth, as during his life he guarded the Constitution 
and the laws of the Union. The stranger approach- 
ing this sacred spot, shall linger to gaze on the 
noble form of Webster; and, as he crosses the 
threshold of the State House, his eye shall behold 
the sculptured majesty of Washington. Washington 
and Webster! Fortunate conjunction! August com* 
panionship of the great departed ! The one estab- 
lished, the other defended the Constitution of the 
country, and their names shall live, inseparable and 
immortal, in the same transcendent eloquence, and 
in the hearts of their grateful countrymen'. 

The duty has been assigned to me, Mr. Mayor, 
of transferring this statue of Mr. Webster to your 
charge, as the honored Chief Magistrate of the City 
of Boston. For here, more than elsewhere, was 
the scene of his social and domestic happiness, while 
the whole country was the theatre of his triumphs. 
Here were formed many of his earliest and his 



15 

latest friendships — the glory of his opening man- 
hood, and the joy of his advancing age. Among 
the tried and true, who consoled his last hours by 
their presence, were warm hearts from this city — 
some of them, alas ! now cold in the grave — beloved 
friends who stood by his side in the battle of life, 
and wept around his dying bed. The greatness of 
Webster is an eternal acquisition to his country; 
but the City and the State which adopted and cher- 
ished him, share with the place of his birth, the 
dearest interest in his renown. 

As the organ of the subscribers to this statue, and 
of the Executive Committee, I now formally deliver 
it, Mr. Mayor, to you. From this moment, it is no 
longer a private possession; it becomes a sacred 
public trust. Here let it stand, not only to perpet- 
uate our reverence for an illustrious man, but to 
keep alive the principles that inspired, and the vir- 
tues that adorned his long and patriotic career. 



16 



The Mayor received the statue on behalf of the City of Boston, and surrendered it 
to the keeping of the Commonwealth, as follows: 

We have assembled, fellow-citizens, on the birthday 
of our ancient metropolis, to celebrate the event with 
ceremonies appropriate to the occasion. 

You have gathered at our City Hall, the home of 
our municipal legislation, and starting from the statue 
of the great Native Bostonian, have come up here 
under the shadow of the Capitol of the Commonwealth 
to assist in the inauguration of a similar memorial of 
the greatest of her adopted sons. 

Boston at all times has delighted to honor those 
who have honored her, and what name on her illustri- 
ous roll of fame will shine more resplendently in the 
future than that of Daniel Webster ? 

The formalities of the present occasion require but 
a simple service from me — to receive on behalf of the 
City of Boston the Statue which is now before us, and 
to transfer it, in accordance with the wishes of the pro- 
prietors, to the custody of the Commonwealth. 

The monarchical governments of the Old World 
often erect statues of their favorites, and pay for 
them out of the public coffers. With us the people's 
spontaneous love furnishes the monument and pre- 
sents it to the Government of their choice. 

It does not become me in this presence to enter into 
any eulogium on Daniel Webster. He made Boston 



17 



his home, and through his citizenship added to the 
renown of the city by the brilliancy of his genius and 
the value of his public services. 

At his death, her people, in common with the whole 
country, bewailed his loss, and united in those public 
demonstrations of sorrow which were respectful to his 
memory. Time may temper somewhat the poignancy 
of our grief, but he "still lives" in those masterly 
expositions of American statesmanship which he has 
bequeathed to posterity. During his lifetime he occu- 
pied a prominent position in public observation. We 
would seek, if possible, by the service of art to prolong 
his visible presence. 

The Committee of Citizens under whose auspices 
this Statue has been prepared, have seen fit, through 
their organ, in the first place to present it to the muni- 
cipal authorities of Boston. In their behalf I receive 
it, and in turn would present it to Your Excellency, 
the Governor of the Commonwealth. 

It was as the special representative of the Boston 
District that Mr. Webster took his seat in Congress, 
after he made our city his home. The whole State, 
however, soon claimed his services, and it was as a 
Senator of Massachusetts that he achieved the greater 
portion of his fame, and performed the more important 
labors for the public welfare. 

We make this offering, sir, to our beloved Common- 
wealth, on our municipal anniversary, but we do not 



18 



forget that this day has other associations connected 
with it. It is the seventy-second anniversary of the 
adoption of the Constitution of the United States. 

Truly no more appropriate day could be selected for 
the inauguration of a monument in honor of one whose 
popular title during his lifetime was that of the 
" Defender of the Constitution." 

We place it in the care and custody of the Common- 
wealth. May it remain an ornament to the Capitol 
grounds so long as legislators shall go up thither to 
make laws for a free people. May strangers and 
citizens, as they gaze upon it, feel a renewed assurance 
in the stability of the Republic and the perpetuity of 
our institutions. May patriots feel a new inspiration 
in its presence as they behold one of the nation's 
greatest benefactors thus remembered and honored by 
the people. 



19 



Governor Banks in behalf of the Commonwealth accepted the Statue by the 
following address: 

The celebration of this day, Mr. Mayor, marks 
two public events of immediate local interest to the 
people of the Commonwealth, — the birth of a city 
so renowned as its metropolis, and the monumental 
commemoration of the career of a citizen so dis- 
tinguished as Daniel Webster, whose name has been 
made illustrious by unsurpassed strength of intellect 
and transcendent genius. 

Greatly distinguished men may, without extrava- 
gance, be identified with the political and social 
communities in which they are reared, or to which, 
in the meridian splendor of life, they contributed 
of their strength and labor. Their powers are dis- 
proportionate, and their destinies dissimilar; yet, in 
the economy of Divine Providence, the silent but 
perpetual ascendency of character, in states as in 
statesmen, corresponds in so many respects, and 
harmonizes in so many attributes, that the advent 
of one and the career of the other may without 
impropriety be celebrated together. And I congrat- 
ulate myself, sir, that it is permitted me, in this 
public manner, as the representative of the people 
of Massachusetts, to make official recognition of the 
great honor which the municipality of Boston lias 
conferred upon our ancient and beloved Common- 
wealth. 



20 



Cities, it has been truly said, I think, are the 
nurseries of freedom. They mark, with the towns 
from which they spring, the line that separates rude 
and wandering tribes of men from settled and civil- 
ized forms of society. It is through their contests 
and sorrows, in a great degree, that we have attained 
our now imperishable institutions of government, 
and enjoy, in peace and prosperity, the blessings of 
rational liberty. 

There are no more inspiring themes among the 
traditions of men, than those which recount the 
collection of families and the creation of cities that 
during a succession of ages maintained forms of 
government, established popular rights, opened paths 
of Christian intercourse with each other through 
the avenues of commerce, enlarged the circles and 
elevated the mission of learning and art, and 
hemmed in the great middle sea of antiquity with 
a myriad of commercial establishments, that mark in 
succession the culmination and decline of the power 
of Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and 
Venitians. It was there that civilization found its 
earliest and freest development, and from them we 
have derived much if not " all that hitherto has 
dignified human existence, — our arts, our arms, our 
letters, and our religion." Among the proudest of 
these, the city you represent, and which this day 
celebrates its two hundred and twenty-ninth anni- 



21 



versary, may without shame enrol its name and 
record its deeds. In patriotism, in arms, in enter- 
prise, in invention, in art, in letters, in eloquence, in 
beauty, in love of regulated liberty, the animating 
scene we this day witness, the voice we shall hear, 
the history we recall, the future we anticipate, em- 
bolden us to proclaim that the proudest of Phoeni- 
cian or Grecian cities contributed not more to the 
renown of ancient history than the metropolis of 
Massachusetts to the higher and nobler cause of 
American civilization. 

She was among the first to recognize the institu- 
tion of the Jury as a basis of popular government; 
to protest against slavery and the slave trade ; to 
establish printing presses, and to support public jour- 
nals ; to denounce the tyranny of England, and to 
indicate resistance to her government, Her sons 
were the proscribed men of the colonies. Her name 
was a synonym for rebellion in the early days of 
the Revolution, and represented the American cause 
in the Courts of Europe, as Greece might have 
been represented by Athens, or the Roman Empire 
by the " eternal city." No municipality was ever 
more bounteous in her charities, or in the support 
of the twin causes of Education and Christianity. 
She drew to her shores the first steam vessel that 
crossed the Atlantic, and the largest sailing ship 
that ever rode upon the waters floated from her 



22 



docks. With a territory of less than two thousand 
acres originally, an area not so large as the home- 
farm of the great man whose memory we now com- 
memorate, it has become the second commercial 
city of the American Continent. It has helped to 
stretch inland the interminable chain of railways 
that binds together all parts of the country. It has 
never faltered in its duty to the government, nor 
in its allegiance to the Union. It has yet stronger 
claim to our respect. Her sons and daughters never 
lose affection for their native city, but carry with 
them to the ends of the earth, and to the grave 
itself, the tender attachments that animate offspring 
and parent. 

I am happy, also, to participate with you in the 
commemoration of the day of its nativity by the 
inauguration of a statue to the memory of Mr. Web- 
ster, so long one of its most distinguished citizens ; 
who so long represented the Commonwealth in 
Congress and the Cabinet ; to whose name, in a 
period of public peril, by universal consent, was 
added the title — Defender of the Constitution ; 
whose love of the union of States so colored his 
opinions and his life, and whose fame as a jurist 
and orator adds lustre to American jurisprudence 
and American eloquence. 

He was in the service of the people of Massachu- 
setts and of the Union for an uninterrupted term 



23 



of thirty years, quite reaching the period of his 
death. He identified himself by important services 
with the reorganization of the constitutional law of 
the State ; with the statutes relating to criminal 
jurisprudence ; to the currency, commerce, naviga- 
tion and manufactures of the Union ; harmonizing 
by just interpretation, at the Bar, in the Senate and 
the Cabinet, its constitutional and congressional 
enactments with conflicting State constitutions and 
State legislation. In some respects, his services of 
this character have been rarely equalled, and never 
surpassed. It is not the fortune of men, neither 
of rulers nor of servants, always to receive instan- 
taneous or universal approval in all public acts. 
The higher the occasion, the weightier the act, the 
more certain is the conflict of interest and opinion. 
Nature speaks through such diversities of education 
and constitution, by such varied personal experi- 
ences, that it is enough, and only such success as 
the greatest men attain, if they are able to stamp 
upon the body of the age in which they live the 
form and pressure of their own opinions ; to connect 
the present with the future, through the silent 
but far-reaching influence of their own passionate 
emotion or uncompromising reason. In this, Mr. 
Webster was unlike and greater than most men of 
any age. His character is impressed, to an extent 



24 



rarely equalled, upon the manners, language, ideas, 
legislation, and constitutional lore of his time. 

The people of the Union will cherish their rec- 
ollections of him as one of the grand representa- 
tives of American intellect and character. New 
England will be proud of his birth and his honors; 
Massachusetts of his identification with her history. 
Over his grave they will discontinue the controver- 
sies connected with his life, remembering the broad- 
hearted and reverential love he bore his country 
and its people, and gather lessons of wisdom from 
his career. Every breeze that sweeps from the 
south, over the haven of the Pilgrims, from his tomb 
by the sad-sounding sea, will be forever sharpened 
by a poignant regret, will be forever freighted with 
a weighty admonition to the youth of our land, 
that in the contests of men concession does not 
always secure peace. 

It is fit that for such men monuments of bronze 
or marble should be planted upon the foundations 
of the earth. They are the landmarks of the ages. 
They represent the transitions of thought, the con- 
quests of experiment. It is from such men that 
students of history, doubting mariners on the sea 
of time, take new observations, and "thence make 
progression." 

In a life of threescore and ten years of great 
activity, encountering in hot contests the advocates 



25 



and assailants of all social and political problems 
of the time, treating all with distinguished ability, 
and encountering many with extraordinary manifes- 
tations of power, it is apparent that different im- 
pressions as to his character will have been made 
upon different generations of men. It is a question 
of some interest which of the generations partici- 
pating in a life like Mr. Webster's shall claim the 
privilege of indicating its leading characteristics, 
and to which belongs the right to demand that its 
personification in bronze or marble shall conform 
to the image impressed upon its own faculty of 
observation. The response must be different, as it 
is applied to different men. Precocity of intellect 
would indicate the period of youth as the proper 
era for delineation. Age alone could represent a 
life whose honors rested upon accumulation. But 
for a life signalized by impetuous and heroic achieve- 
ment, no representation satisfies enlightened curi- 
osity unless it be of that period made illustrious by 
startling manifestations of power. It is as Cromwell 
appeared at Marston Moor, or Naseby, to the rapt 
vision of a squadron of the Ironsides, that he should 
be represented. Our conception of Wellington is 
as he conquered at Waterloo, and not as he died 
at Apsley House : of Napoleon, as he appeared in 
the eyes of the Old Guard at Austerlitz or Marengo, 
and not as in his controversies with Sir Hudson 

4 



26 



Lowe at St. Helena : of Washington, as he looked 
to the Sons of Liberty, when in the darkest hours 
of the Revolution, with more than Napoleonic vigor, 
he stormed the lines of British troops, or with higher 
patriotism than that of Greek or Roman fame, 
in the zenith of his power, he surrendered at An- 
napolis his commission as Commander-in-chief of the 
American army. 

Heroic characters may rightly demand so much 
as this. It is ill content with the portraiture that 
satisfied Cromwell — who demanded a representation 
of personal and physical deformities — and seeks 
the elevation, the idealization of an artistic, devo- 
tionalistic conception. 

Such seems to me to be the Statue that the 
distinguished American artist has presented. It is 
Webster in the pride of intellect, the plenitude of 
power, who at Plymouth portrayed the results of 
Puritan civilization in the New World, and hurled 
Demosthenic anathemas at the reviving slave trade. 
It is the Senator who described, as language of 
description was never before used, the military power 
of Great Britain. It is the orator who felt that 
he could speak for all the receding and advancing 
generations : who imprinted upon every American 
heart, in a burst of forensic eloquence that has no 
fellow in the Saxon language, a triumphant vindica- 
tion of the honor of Massachusetts, and wrought a 



27 



conviction in all hearts of the inseparable natures 
of Liberty and Union ! It is him ! ah him ! as he 
looked — as he lived — as we might desire him to be 
represented — as he might wish to be remembered. 
As such I accept the Statue at your hands, Mr. 
Mayor, in the name of the people, and shall ask for 
it the protection of the Commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts. May it stand upon its firmly planted 
pedestal as long as monuments shall stand, until 
the earth crumble, and the dome and column of the 
Capitol mingle in the dust together. May it every 
day in the year, and every hour in the day, incite 
youth and age to a love of country and of liberty. 
May it stimulate a patriotic public taste in works 
of art, until the public grounds of State and City 
shall smile with the effigies of the worthiest sons 
and daughters of the Commonwealth, whether it be 
of the founders of States, like Winthrop ; of those 
who meet death in the column of battle, like War- 
ren ; of the princes of the forum, like Choate ; or 
who, like Mann, sink sweetly into the sleep of a 
better life, overtasked in the work of training the 
youthful mind to a full appreciation of the grandeur 
of its mission and power. 



The following Eulogy was then pronounced by Mr. Everett ; considerable portions, 
however, being omitted in the delivery, in consequence of its length. 



EULOGY 



May it please Your Excellency: 

On behalf of those by whose contributions the 
Statue of Mr. Webster has been procured, and of 
the Committee entrusted with the care of its erec- 
tion, it is my pleasing duty to return to you, and 
through you to the Legislature of the Common- 
wealth, our dutiful acknowledgments for the per- 
mission kindly accorded to us, to place the statue 
in the Public Grounds. We feel, sir, that in allow- 
ing this monumental work to be erected in front 
of the Capitol of the State, a distinguished honor 
has been paid to the memory of Mr. Webster. 

To you, sir, in particular, whose influence was 
liberally employed to bring about this result, and 
whose personal attendance and participation have 
added so much to the interest of the day, we are 
under the highest obligations. 

To you, also, Mr. Mayor, and to the City Council, 
we return our cordial thanks for your kind consent 
to act on our behalf, in delivering this cherished 
memorial of our honored fellow-citizen into the cus- 



30 

tody of the Commonwealth, and for your sympathy 
and assistance in the duties of the occasion. 

To you, our distinguished guests, and to you, 
fellow-citizens of either sex, who come to unite with 
us in rendering these monumental honors, who adorn 
the occasion with your presence, and cheer us with 
your countenance and favor, we tender a respectful 
and grateful welcome. 

The inclemency of the weather has made a change 
in our arrangements for your reception necessary, 
and compelled us to flee from the public grounds 
to this spacious hall. But we will not murmur at 
this slight inconvenience. We are not the only 
children for whom the Universal Parent cares. The 
rain, which has incommoded and disappointed us, is 
most welcome to the husbandman and the farmer. 
It will yield their last fulness to the maturing 
fruits and grains; it will clothe the parched fields 
with autumnal verdure, and revive the failing pas- 
turage ; it will replenish the exhausted springs, and 
thus promote the comfort of beast and of man. 
We have no reason to lament that while, with these 
simple ceremonies, we dedicate the statue of Daniel 
Webster within these walls, the work of human hands, 
the genial skies are baptizing it with gentle showers, 
beneath the arch of heaven. 

It has been the custom, from the remotest an- 
tiquity, to preserve and to hand down to posterity, 



31 



in bronze and in marble, the counterfeit presentment 
of illustrious men. Within the last few years, mod- 
ern research has brought to light, on the banks of 
the Tigris, huge slabs of alabaster, buried for ages, 
which exhibit in relief the faces and the persons 
of men who governed the primeval East in the 
gray dawn of history. Three thousand years have 
elapsed since they lived and reigned, and built pal- 
aces, and fortified cities, and waged war, and gained 
victories, of which the trophies are carved upon 
these monumental tablets, — the triumphal procession, 
the chariots laden with spoil, the drooping captive, 
the conquered monarch in chains, — but the legends 
inscribed upon the stone are imperfectly deciphered, 
and little bej^ond the names of the personages and 
the most general tradition of their exploits is pre- 
served. In like manner the obelisks and the temples 
of ancient Egypt are covered with the sculptured 
images of whole dynasties of Pharaohs, — older than 
Moses, older than Joseph, — whose titles are recorded 
in the hieroglyphics, with which the granite is 
charged, and which are gradually yielding up their 
long concealed mysteries to the sagacity of modern 
criticism. The plastic arts, as they passed into Hel- 
las, with all the other arts which give grace and 
dignity to our nature, reached a perfection unknown 
to Egypt or Assyria; and the heroes and sages of 
Greece and Rome, immortalized by the sculptor, still 



?l 



32 



people the galleries and museums of the modern 
world. In every succeeding age, and in every 
country in which the line arts have been cultivated, 
the respect and affection of survivors have found a 
pure and rational gratification in the historical por- 
trait and the monumental statue of the honored 
and loved in private life, and especially of the great 
and good who have deserved well of their country. 
Public esteem and confidence and private affection, 
the gratitude of the community and the fond mem- 
ories of the fireside, have ever sought, in this way, 
to prolong the sensible existence of their beloved 
and respected objects. What, though the dear and 
honored features and person, on which, while living, 
we never gazed without tenderness or veneration, 
have been taken from us; — something of the love- 
liness, something of the majesty abides in the por- 
trait, the bust, and the statue. The heart, bereft of 
the living originals, turns to them, and cold and silent 
as they are, they strengthen and animate the cher- 
ished recollections of the loved, the honored, and 
the lost. 

The skill of the painter and sculptor which thus 
conies in aid of the memory and imagination, is, in 
its highest degree, one of the rarest, as it is one 
of the most exquisite accomplishments within our 
attainment, and in its perfection as seldom witnessed 
as the perfection of speech or of music. The plas- 



33 

tic hand must be moved by the same ethereal in- 
stinct as the eloquent lips or the recording pen. 
The number of those who, in the language of Mi- 
chael Angelo, can discern the finished statue in the 
heart of the shapeless block, and bid it start into 
artistic life, — who are endowed with the exquisite 
gift of moulding the rigid bronze or the lifeless 
marble into graceful, majestic, and expressive forms, 
is not greater than the number of those who are 
able, with equal majesty, grace, and expressiveness, 
to make the spiritual essence, — the finest shades of 
thought and feeling, — sensible to the mind, through 
the eye and the ear, in the mysterious embodiment 
of the written and the spoken word. If Athens 
in her palmiest days had but one Pericles, she had 
also but one Phidias. 

Nor are these beautiful and noble arts, by which 
the face and the form of the departed are pre- 
served to us, — calling into the highest exercise as 
they do all the imitative and idealizing powers of 
the painter and sculptor, — the least instructive of 
our teachers. The portraits and the statues of the 
honored dead, kindle the generous ambition of the 
youthful aspirant to fame. Themistocles could not 
sleep for the trophies in the Ceramicus ; and when 
the living Demosthenes to whom you, sir, (Mr. Fel- 
ton,) have alluded, had ceased to speak, the stony 
lips remained to rebuke and exhort his degenerate 



34 



countrymen. More than a hundred years have 
elapsed since the great Newton passed away ; but 
from age to age his statue by Roubillac, in the 
ante-chapel of Trinity College, will give distinctness 
to the conceptions formed of him by hundreds and 
thousands of ardent youthful spirits, filled with rev- 
erence for that transcendent intellect which, from 
the phenomena that fall within our limited vision, 
deduced the imperial law by which the Sovereign 
Mind rules the entire universe. We can never look 
on the person of Washington, but his serene and 
noble countenance, perpetuated by the pencil and 
the chisel, Is familiar to far greater multitudes than 
ever stood in his living presence, and will be thus 
familiar to the latest generation. 

What parent, as he conducts his son to Mount 
Auburn or to Bunker Hill, will not, as he pauses 
before their monumental statues, seek to heighten 
his reverence for virtue, for patriotism, for science, 
for learning, for devotion to the public good, as he 
bids him contemplate the form of that grave and 
venerable Winthrop, who left his pleasant home in 
England to come and found a new republic in this 
untrodden wilderness ; of that ardent and intrepid 
Otis, who first struck out the spark of American 
independence ; of that noble Adams, its most elo- 
quent champion on the floor of Congress ; of that 
martyr Warren, who laid down his life in its de- 



:;:» 



fence; of that self-taught Bowditch, who, without a 
guide, threaded the starry mazes of the heavens; 
of that Story, honored at home and abroad as one 
of the brightest luminaries of the law, and, by a 
felicity of which I believe there is no other example, 
admirably portrayed in marble by his son? What 
citizen of Boston, as he accompanies the stranger 
around our streets, guiding him through our busy 
thoroughfares, to our wharfs, crowded with vessels 
which range every sea and gather the produce of 
every climate, up to the dome of this capitol, which 
commands as lovely a landscape as can delight the 
eye or gladden the heart, will not, as he calls his 
attention at last to the statues of Franklin and 
Webster, exclaim: — "Boston takes pride in her nat- 
ural position, she rejoices in her beautiful environs, 
she is grateful for her material prosperity ; but richer 
than the merchandise stored in palatial warehouses, 
greener than the slopes of sea-girt islets, lovelier 
than this encircling panorama of land and sea. of 
field and hamlet, of lake and stream, of garden and 
grove, is the memory of her sons, native and adopted ; 
the character, services and fame of those who have 
benefited and adorned their day and generation. 
Our children, and the schools at which they are 
trained, our citizens, and the services they have ren- 
dered: — these are our monuments, these are our 
jewels, these our abiding treasures." 



36 



Yes, your long rows of quarried granite, may 
crumble to the dust ; the cornfields in yonder vil- 
lages, ripening to the sickle, may, like the plains of 
stricken Lombardy, a few weeks ago, be kneaded 
into bloody clods by the madding wheels of artil- 
lery; this populous city, like the old cities of 
Etruria and the Campagna Romana, may be deso- 
lated by the pestilence which walketh in darkness, 
may decay with the lapse of time, and the busy 
mart, which now rings with the joyous din of 
trade, become as lonely and still as Carthage or 
Tyre, as Babylon and Nineveh ; but the names of 
the great and good shall survive the desolation 
and the ruin ; the memory of the wise, the brave, 
the patriotic, shall never perish. Yes, Sparta is a 
wheat-field : — a Bavarian prince holds court at the 
foot of the Acropolis ; — the travelling virtuoso digs 
for marbles in the Roman Forum and beneath the 
ruins of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus ; but 
Lycurgus and Leonidas, and Miltiades and Demos- 
thenes, and Cato and Tully " still live " ; and he 
still lives, and all the great and good shall live in 
the heart of ages, while marble and bronze shall 
endure ; and when marble and bronze have per- 
ished, they shall "still live" in memory, so long as 
men shall reverence Law, and honor Patriotism, 
and love Liberty. 



37 



EULOGIES AT THE TIME OF MR. WEBSTER'S DECEASE. 

Seven years, within a few weeks, have passed 
since he, whose statue we inaugurate to-day, was 
taken from us. The voice of respectful and affec- 
tionate eulogy, which was uttered in this vicinity 
and city at the time, was promptly echoed through- 
out the country. The tribute paid to his memory, 
by friends, neighbors, and fellow-citizens, was re- 
sponded to from the remotest corners of the Republic 
by those who never gazed on his noble countenance, 
or listened to the deep melody of his voice. This 
city, which in early manhood he chose for his 
home ; his associates in the honorable profession of 
which he rose to be the acknowledged head ; the law- 
school of the neighboring university speaking by 
the lips of one so well able to do justice to his 
legal preeminence ; the college at which he was 
educated and whose chartered privileges he had 
successfully maintained before the highest tribunal 
of the country; with other bodies and other eulo- 
gists, at the bar, in the pulpit, and on the platform, 
throughout the Union, in numbers, greater I believe 
than have ever spoken on any other similar occa- 
sion, except that of the death of Washington, 
joined with the almost unanimous Press of the 
country, in one chorus of admiration of his talents. 



38 



recognition of his patriotic services, and respect and 
affection for his memory. 

Nor have these offerings been made at his tomb 
alone. Twice or thrice since his death, once within 
a few months, — the anniversary of his birthday, has 
called forth, at the table of patriotic festivity, the 
voice of fervid eulogy and affectionate commemo- 
ration. In this way and on these occasions, his 
character has been delineated by those best able 
to do justice to his powers and attainments, to ap- 
preciate his services, to take the measure, if I may 
so say, of his colossal mental stature. Without 
going beyond this immediate neighborhood, and in 
no degree ungrateful for the liberality or insensible 
to the ability with which he has been eulogized in 
other parts of the country, what need be said, what 
can be said in the hearing of those who have lis- 
tened to Hillarcl, to Chief Justice Parker, to dish- 
ing, and to our lamented Choate, whose discourse 
on Mr. Webster at Dartmouth College appears to 
me as magnificent a eulogium as was ever pro- 
nounced ? 

What can be said that has not been better said 
before ; — what need be said now that seven added 
years in the political progress of the country, seven 
years of respectful and affectionate recollection on 
the part of those who now occupy the stage, have 
confirmed his title to the large place, which, while 



39 



he lived, he filled in the public mind ? While he 
yet bore a part in the councils of the Union, he 
shared the fate which, in all countries, and espe- 
cially in all free countries, awaits commanding 
talent and eminent position : — which no great man 
in our history, — not Washington himself, — has ever 
escaped ; which none can escape, but those who 
are too feeble to provoke opposition, too obscure 
for jealousy. But now that he has rested for years 
in his honored grave, what generous nature is not 
pleased to strew flowers on the sod ? What hon- 
orable opponent, still faithful to principle, is not 
willing that all in which he differed from him 
should be referred, without bitterness, to the im- 
partial arbitrament of time ; and that all that he 
respected and loved should be cordially remem- 
bered ? What public man, especially who, with 
whatever differences of judgment of men or meas- 
ures, has borne on his own shoulders the heavy 
burden of responsibility, — who has felt how hard 
it is, in the larger complications of affairs, at all 
times, to meet the expectations of an intelligent 
and watchful, but impulsive and not always thor- 
oughly instructed public ; how difficult sometimes 
to satisfy his own judgment, — is not willing that 
the noble qualities and patriotic services of Webster 
should be honorably recorded in the book of the 
country's remembrance, and his statue set up in 
the Pantheon of her illustrious sons? 



40 



POSTHUMOUS HONORS. 



These posthumous honors lovingly paid to de- 
parted worth are among the compensations, which 
a kind Providence vouchsafes, for the unavoidable 
conflicts of judgment and stern collisions of party, 
which make the political career always arduous, 
even when pursued with the greatest success, gen- 
erally precarious, sometimes destructive of health 
and even of life. It is impossible under free govern- 
ments to prevent the existence of party ; not less 
impossible that parties should be conducted with 
spirit and vigor, without more or less injustice done 
and suffered, more or less gross uncharitableness and 
bitter denunciation. Besides, with the utmost effort 
at impartiality, it is not within the competence of 
our frail capacities to do full justice at the time 
to a character of varied and towering greatness, 
engaged in an active and responsible political career. 
The truth of his principles, the wisdom of his coun- 
sels, the value of his services must be seen in their 
fruits, and the richest fruits are not those of the 
most rapid growth. The wisdom of antiquity pro- 
nounced that no one was to be deemed happy until 
after death; not merely because he was then first 
placed beyond the vicissitudes of human fortune, but 
because then only the rival interests, the discordant 
judgments, the hostile passions of contemporaries 



41 



are, in ordinary cases, no longer concerned to ques- 
tion his merits. Horace, with gross adulation, sang 
to his imperial master, Augustus, that he alone of 
the great of the earth ever received while living 
the full meed of praise. All the other great bene- 
factors of mankind, the inventors of arts, the de- 
stroyers of monsters, the civilizers of states, found 
by experience that hatred and envy were appeased 
by death alone* 

That solemn event which terminates the material 
existence, becomes by the sober revisions of contempo- 
rary judgment, aided by offices of respectful and affec- 
tionate commemoration, the commencement of a nobler 
life on earth. The wakeful eyes are closed, the feverish 
pulse is still, the tired and trembling limbs are relieved 
from their labors, and the aching head is laid to rest on 
the lap of its mother earth ; but all that we honored 
and loved in the living man begins to live again in a 
new and higher being of influence and fame. It was 
given but to a limited number to listen to the living 
voice, and they can never listen to it again, but the 
wise teachings, the grave admonitions, the patriotic 
exhortations which fell from his tongue, will be gath- 
ered together and garnered up in the memory of 
millions. The cares, the toils, the sorrows; the con- 
flicts with others, the conflicts of the fervent spirit with 

* Comperit invidiam suprenu) fine domcwi. 
6 



42 



itself; the sad accidents of humanity, the fears of the 
brave, the follies of the wise, the errors of the learned ; 
all that dashed the cup of enjoyment with bitter drops, 
and strewed sorrowful ashes over the beauty of expec- 
tation and promise ; the treacherous friend, the ungen- 
erous rival, the mean and malignant foe ; the unchari- 
table prejudice which withheld the just tribute of 
praise ; the human frailty which wove sharp thorns into 
the wreath of solid merit; — all these, in ordinary cases, 
are buried in the grave of the illustrious dead ; while 
their brilliant talents, their deeds of benevolence and 
public spirit, their wise and eloquent words, their 
healing counsels, their generous affections, the whole 
man, in short, whom we revered and loved, and would 
fain imitate, especially when his image is impressed 
upon our recollections by the pencil or the chisel, goes 
forth to the admiration of the latest posterity. Ex- 
tinctus amabitur idem. 

THE OBSEQUIES OE MR. CHOATE. 

Our city has lately witnessed a most beautiful 
instance of this reanimating power of death. A few 
weeks since, we followed towards the tomb the lifeless 
remains of our lamented Choate. Well may we conse- 
crate a moment, even of this hour, to him who, in that 
admirable discourse to which I have already alluded, 
did such noble justice to himself and the great subject 



43 



of his eulogy. A short time before the decease of our 
much honored friend, I had seen him shattered by 
disease, his all-persuasive voice faint and languid, his 
beaming eye quenched; and as he left us in search 
of health in a foreign clime, a painful image and a 
sad foreboding, too soon fulfilled, dwelt upon my 
mind. But on the morning of the day when we 
were to pay the last mournful offices to our friend, 
the 23d of July, with a sad, let me not say a repining, 
thought, that so much talent, so much learning, so 
much eloquence, so much wit, so much wisdom, so 
much force of intellect, so much kindness of heart, 
were taken from us, an engraved likeness of him 
was brought to me, in which he seemed to live again. 
The shadows of disease and suffering had passed 
from the brow, the well-remembered countenance Mas 
clothed with its wonted serenity, a cheerful smile 
lighted up the features, genius kindled in the eye, 
persuasion hovered over the lips, and I felt as if I 
was going not to his funeral but his triumph. 
"Weep not for me," it seemed to say, "but wee]) 
for yourselves." And never, while he dwelt among 
us in the feeble tabernacle of the flesh ; never while 
the overtasked spirit seemed to exhaust the delicate 
frame in which it sojourned ; never as I had listened 
to the melody of his living voice, did he speak to 
uiv imagination and heart with such a touching 
though silent eloquence, as when we followed his 



44 



hearse along these streets, that bright midsummer's 

O S3 

noon, up the via sacra in front of this capital, slowly 
moving to the solemn beat of grand dead marches, 
as they rose and swelled from wailing clarion and 
muffled drum, while the minute-guns from yonder 
lawn responded to the passing bell from yonder 
steeple. I then understood the sublime significance 
of the words which Cicero puts into the mouth of 
Cato, that the mind, elevated to the foresight of pos- 
terity, when departing from this life, begins at length 
to live ; yea, the sublimer words of a greater than 
Cicero, " death, where is thy sting ? grave, 
where is thy victory?" And then, as we passed the 
abodes of those whom he knew, and honored and 
loved, and who had gone before ; of Lawrence here 
on the left; of Prescott yonder on the right; this 
home where Hancock lived and Washington was 
received ; this where Lafayette sojourned ; this cap- 
itol, where his own political course began, and on 
which so many patriotic memories are concentrated, 
I felt, not as if we were conducting another frail and 
weary body to the tomb, but as if we were escorting 
a noble brother to the congenial company of the 
departed great and good ; and I was ready myself to 
exclaim, " prccclarum diem, cum ad illud divinum ani- 
morum concilium ccetumqae projisciscar, camqae ex hac turha 
et culluvione discedam." 



45 



THE PERIOD IN WHICH MR. WEBSTER LIVED. 

It will not, I think, be expected of me to under- 
take the superfluous task of narrating in great detail 
the well-known events of Mr. Webster's life, or of 
attempting an elaborate delineation of that character, 
to which such ample justice has already been done 
by master hands. I deem it sufficient to say in 
general, that, referred to all the standards by which 
public character can be estimated, he exhibited, in a 
rare degree, the qualities of a truly great man. 

The period at which he came forward in life, and 
during which he played so distinguished a part, was 
not one in which small men, dependent upon their 
own exertions, are likely to rise to a high place in 
public estimation. The present generation of young 
men are hardly aware of the vehemence of the 
storms that shook the world at the time, when Mr. 
Webster became old enough to form the first childish 
conceptions of the nature of the events in progress 
at home and abroad. His recollection, he tells us. 
in an autobiographical sketch, went back to the }^ear 
1790, — a year when the political system of conti- 
nental Europe was about to plunge into a state of 
frightful disintegration, while, under the new^ consti- 
tution, the United States were commencing an 
unexampled career of prosperity; Washington just 
entering upon the first Presidency of the new-born 



46 



republic ; the reins of the oldest monarchy in Europe 
slipping, besmeared with blood, from the hands of 
the descendant of thirty generations of kings. The 
fearful struggle between France and the allied powers 
succeeded, which strained the resources of the Euro- 
pean governments to their utmost tension. Armies 
and navies were arrayed against each other, such as 
the civilized world had never seen before, and wars 
waged beyond all former experience. The storm 
passed over the continent as a tornado passes through 
a forest, when it comes rolling and roaring from the 
clouds, and prostrates the growth of centuries in its 
path. England, in virtue of her insular position, her 
naval power, and her free institutions, had, more than 
any other foreign country, weathered the storm ; but 
Russia saw the Arctic sky lighted with the flames of 
her old Muscovite capital; the shadowy Kaisers of 
the House of Hapsburg were compelled to abdicate 
the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and accept as 
a substitute that of Austria ; Prussia, staggering from 
Jena, trembled on the verge of political annihilation ; 
the other German States, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, 
and the Spanish Peninsula, were convulsed ; Egypt 
overrun ; Constantinople and the East threatened ; 
and in many of these states, institutions, laws, ideas, 
and manners were changed as effectually as dynasties. 
With the downfall of Napoleon, a partial recon- 
struction of the old forms took place ; but the 



47 



political genius of the continent of Europe was 
revolutionized. 

On this side of the Atlantic, the United States, 
though studying an impartial neutrality, were drawn 
at first to some extent into the outer circles of the 
terrific maelstrom; but soon escaping, they started 
upon a career of national growth and development 
of which the world has witnessed no other example. 
Meantime, the Spanish and the Portuguese Vice- 
royalties south of us, from Mexico to Cape Horn, 
asserted their independence; that Castillian empire 
on which the sun never set was dismembered, and 
the golden chain was forever sundered, by which 
Columbus had linked half his new-found world to the 
throne of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

Such was the crowd and the importance of the 
events in which, from his childhood up, the life of 
Mr. Webster, and of the generation to which he 
belonged, was passed; and I can with all sincerity 
say, that it has never been my fortune, in Europe or 
America, to hold intercourse with any person, who 
seemed to me to penetrate further than he had done 
into the spirit of the age, under its successive phases 
of dissolution, chaos, reconstruction, and progress. 
Born and bred on the verge of the wilderness, (bis 
father a veteran of those old French and Indian wars. 
in which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, 
wild men came out of the woods, to wage war with 



48 



the tomahawk and the scalping knife, against the 
fireside and the cradle), with the slenderest opportu- 
nities for early education, entering life with scarce 
the usual facilities for reading the riddle of foreign 
statecraft, remote from the scene of action, relying 
upon sources of information equally open to all the 
world, he seemed to me, nevertheless, by the instinct 
of a great capacity, to have comprehended in all its 
aspects the march of events in Europe and this 
country. He surveyed the agitation of the age with 
calmness, deprecated its excesses, sympathized with 
its progressive tendencies, rejoiced in its triumphs. 
His first words in Congress, when he came unan- 
nounced from his native hills in 1813, proclaimed his 
mastery of the perplexed web of European politics, 
in which the United States were then but too deeply 
entangled ; and from that time till his death, I think 
we all felt, those who differed from him as well as 
those who agreed with him, that he was in no degree 
below the standard of his time ; that if Providence 
had cast his lot in the field where the great destinies 
of Europe are decided, this poor New Hampshire 
youth would have carried his head as high among 
the Metternichs, the Nesselrodes, the Hardenbergs, 
the Talleyrands, the Castlereaghs of the day, and 
surely among their successors, who now occupy 
the stage, as he did among his contemporaries at 
home. 



49 



HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 



Let me not be thought, however, in this remark, 
to intimate that these contemporaries at home were 
second-rate men ; far otherwise. It has sometimes 
seemed to me that, owing to the natural reverence 
in which we hold the leaders of the revolutionary 
period, — the heroic age of the country, — and those 
of the constitutional age who brought out of chaos 
this august system of confederate republicanism, we 
hardly do full justice to the third period in our polite 
ical history, which may be dated from about the 
time when Mr. Webster came into political life, and 
continued through the first part of his career. The 
heroes and sages of the revolutionary and constitu- 
tional period, were indeed gone. Washington, Frank- 
lin, Greene, Hamilton, Morris, Jay, slept in their 
honored graves. John Adams, Jefferson, Carroll, 
though surviving, were withdrawn from affairs. But 
Madison, who contributed so much to the formation 
and adoption of the constitution, was at the helm ; 
Monroe in the cabinet; John Quincy Adams, Gallatin 
and Bayard negotiating in Europe; in the Senate 
were Rufus King, Christopher Gore, Jeremiah Mason, 
Giles, Otis; in the House of Representatives, Pick- 
ering, Clay, Lowndes, Cheves, Calhoun, Gaston. For- 
syth, Randolph, Oakley, Pitkin, Grosvenor; on the 
bench of the Supreme Court, Marshall, Livingston, 



50 

Story; at the bar, Dexter, Emmet, Pinkney, and 
Wirt; with many distinguished men not in the gen- 
eral government, of whom it is enough to name 
DeWitt Clinton and Chancellor Kent. It was my 
privilege to see Mr. Webster associated and mingling 
with nearly all these eminent men, and their suc- 
cessors, not only in later years, but in my own 
youth, and when he first came forward, unknown as 
yet to the country at large, scarcely known to himself, 
not arrogant, nor yet wholly unconscious of his mighty 
powers, tied to a laborious profession in a narrow 
range of practice, but glowing with a generous 
ambition, and not afraid to grapple with the strongest 
and boldest in the land. The opinion pronounced 
of him, at the commencement of his career, by Mr. 
Lowndes, that the "South had not in Congress his 
superior, nor the North his equal," savors in the 
form of expression of sectional partiality. If it had 
been said, that neither at the South or the 
North had any public man risen more rapidly to a 
brilliant reputation, no one, I think, would have 
denied the justice of the remark. He stood from 
the first the acknowledged equal of the most distin- 
guished of his associates. In later years he acted 
with the successors of those I have named, with 
Benton, Burges, Edward Livingston, Hayne, McDufne, 
McLean, Sergeant, Clayton, Wilde, Storrs, our own 
Bates, Davis, Gorham, Choate, and others who still 



51 



survive; but it will readily be admitted that he 
never sunk from the position which lie assumed at 
the outset of his career, nor stood second to any 
man in any part of the country. 

THE QUESTIONS DISCUSSED IN HIS TIME. 

If we now look for a moment at the public ques- 
tions with which he was called to deal in the course 
of his career, and with which he did deal, in the most 
masterly manner, as they successively came up, we 
shall find new proofs of his great ability. When he 
first came forward in life, the two great belligerent 
powers of Europe, contending with each other for 
the mastery of the world, despising our youthful 
weakness, and impatient of our gainful neutrality, 
in violation now admitted of the Law of Nations, 
emulated each other in the war waged upon our 
commerce and the insults offered to our flag. To 
engage in a contest with both, would have been 
madness; the choice of the antagonist was a question 
of difficulty, and well calculated to furnish topics of 
reproach and recrimination. Whichever side you 
adopted, your opponent regarded you as being, in a 
great national struggle, the apologist of an unfriendly 
foreign power. In 171)8 the United States chose 
France for their enemy; in 1812, Great Britain. 
War was declared against the latter country on the 



52 



18th of June, 1812; — the orders in Council, which 
were the immediate, though not the exclusive, cause 
of the war, were rescinded five clays afterwards. 
Such are the narrow chances on which the fortunes 
of States depend. 

Great questions of domestic and foreign policy 
followed the close of war. Of the former class were 
the restoration of a currency which should truly 
represent the values which it nominally circulated ; 
a result mainly brought about by a resolution moved 
by Mr. Webster; — the fiscal system of the Union 
and the best mode of connecting the collection, 
safe-keeping, and disbursement of the public funds, 
with the commercial wants, and especially with the 
exchanges of the country ; — the stability of the 
manufactures, which had been called into existence 
during the war; what can constitutionally be done, 
ought anything as a matter of policy to be clone by 
Congress, to protect them from the competition of 
foreign skill, and the glut of foreign markets ; the 
internal communications of the Union, a question of 
paramount interest before the introduction of rail- 
roads; — can the central power do anything, what 
can it do, by roads and canals, to bind the distant 
parts of the continent together; the enlargement of 
the judicial system of the country to meet the wants 
of the greatly increased number of the States ; the 
revision of the criminal code of the United States, 



>3 



which was almost exclusively his work; the admin- 
istration of the public lands, and the best mode of 
filling with civilized and Christian homes this immense 
domain, the amplest heritage which was ever sub- 
jected to the control of a free government; connected 
with the public domain, the relations of the civilized 
and dominant race to the aboriginal children of the 
soil ; and lastly, the constitutional questions on the 
nature of the government, which were raised in that 
gigantic controversy on the interpretation of the 
fundamental law itself. These were some of the most 
important domestic questions which occupied the 
attention of Congress and the country, while Mr. 
Webster was on the stage. 

Of questions connected with foreign affairs, were 
those growing out of the war, which was in progress 
when he first became a member of Congress, — then 
the various questions of International Law, some of 
them as novel as they were important, which had 
reference to the entrance or the attempted entrance 
of so many new States into the family of nations; in 
Europe, — Greece, Belgium, Hungary; — on this con- 
tinent, twelve or fourteen new republics, great and 
small, bursting from the ruins of the Spanish colonial 
empire, like a group of asteroids from the wreck of 
an exploded planet; — the invitation of the infanl 
American Republics to meet them in Congress a( 
Panama; — our commercial relations with the Briti.sli 



54 



Colonies in the West Indies and on this continent; 
— demands on several European States for spoliations 
on our commerce during the wars of the French 
Revolution ; — our secular controversy with England 
relative to the boundary of the United States on the 
north-eastern and Pacific frontiers ; — our relations 
with Mexico, previous to the war; the immunity of 
the American flag upon the common jurisdiction of 
the ocean ; — and more important than all other 
questions, foreign or domestic, in its influence upon 
the general politics of the country, the great sectional 
controversy, — not then first commenced, but greatly 
increased in warmth and energy, — which connected 
itself with the organization of the newly acquired 
Mexican territories. 

Such were the chief questions on which it was Mr. 
Webster's duty to form opinions; as an influential 
member of Congress and a political leader, to speak 
and to vote; as a member of the Executive govern- 
ment, to exercise a powerful, over some of them, a 
decisive control. Besides these, there was another 
class of questions of great public importance, which 
came up for adjudication in the Courts of the 
United States, which he was called professionally 
to discuss. Many of the questions of each class now 
referred to, divided, and still divide opinion ; excited, 
and still excite the feelings of individuals, of parties, 
of sections of the country. There are some of them, 



55 



which in the course of a long life, under changing 
circumstances, are likely to be differently viewed at 
different periods, by the same individual. I am not 
here to-day to rake off the warm ashes from the 
embers of controversies, which have spent their fury 
and are dying away, or to fan the fires of those 
which still burn. But no one, I think, whether he 
agreed with Mr. Webster or differed from him, as 
to any of these questions, will deny that he treated 
them each and all as they came up in the Senate, 
in the Courts, or in negotiation with foreign powers, 
in a broad, statesman-like, and masterly way. There 
are few who would not confess, when the}' agreed 
with him, that he had expressed their opinions better 
than they could do it themselves; few, when they 
differed from him, who would not admit that he 
had maintained his own views manfully, powerfully, 
and liberally, 

HIS CAREER AS A STATESMAN. 

Such was the period in which Mr. Webster lived, 
such were the associates with whom he acted, 
the questions with which he had to deal as a states- 
man, a jurist, the head of an administration of the 
government, and a public speaker. Let us contem- 
plate him for a moment in either capacity. 

Without passing through the preliminary stage 



56 

of the State Legislature, and elected to Congress 
in six years from the time of his admission to the 
Superior Court of New Hampshire, he was on his 
first entrance into the House of Representatives, 
placed by Mr. Speaker Clay on the Committee of 
Foreign Affairs, and took rank forthwith as one of 
the leading statesmen of the day. His first speech 
had reference to those famous Berlin and Milan 
decrees and Orders in Council, to which I have 
already alluded, and the impression produced by 
it was such as to lead the venerable Chief Justice 
Marshall, eighteen years afterwards, in writing to 
Mr. Justice Story, to say, "At the time when this 
speech was delivered, I did not know Mr. Webster, 
but I was so much struck with it, that I did not 
hesitate then to state that he was a very able man, 
and would become one of the very first statesmen 
in America, — perhaps the very first." His mind at 
the very outset of his career, had, by a kind of 
instinct, soared from the principles which govern the 
municipal relations of individuals, to those great 
rules which dictate the law of nations to indepen- 
dent States. He tells us, in the fragment of a 
diary kept while he was a law student in Mr. 
Gore's office, that he then read Vattel through for 
the third time. Accordingly, in after life, there 
was no subject which he discussed with greater 
pleasure, and I may add, with greater power, than 



57 



questions of the Law of Nations. The Revolution 
of Greece had from its outbreak, attracted much 
of the attention of the civilized world. A people, 
whose ancestors had originally taught letters and 
arts to mankind, struggling to regain a place in 
the great family of independent States ; the con- 
vulsive efforts of a Christian people, the foundation 
of whose churches by the apostles in person, is 
recorded in the New Testament, to shake off the 
yoke of Mohammedan despotism, possessed a strange 
interest for the friends of Christian Liberty through- 
out Europe and America, President Monroe had 
called the attention of Congress to this most 
interesting struggle, in December, 1823, and Mr. 
Webster, returning to Congress after a retirement 
of eight years, as the Representative of Boston, 
made the Greek Revolution the subject of a motion 
and a speech. In this speech he treated what he 
called "the great question of the day, — the ques- 
tion between absolute and regulated governments." 
He engvao-ed in a searching criticism of the doctrines 
of the "Holy Alliance," and maintained the duty 
of the United States as a great free power to 
protest against them. That speech remains, in my 
judgment, to this clay the ablest and most effective 
remonstrance against the principles of the allied 
military powers of continental Europe. Mr. Jere- 
miah Mason pronounced it "the best sample of 



58 



parliamentary eloquence and statesmanlike reasoning 
which our country had seen." His indignant pro- 
test against the spirit of absolutism, and his words 
of sympathy with an infant people struggling for 
independence, were borne on the wings of the wind 
throughout Christendom. They were read in every 
language, at every court, in every cabinet, in every 
reading room, on every market place ; by the repub- 
licans of Mexico and Spanish South America, by 
the patriots of Italy and of Poland ; on the Tagus, 
on the Danube, as well as at the head of the 
little armies of revolutionary Greece. The practical 
impression which it made on the American mind 
was seen in the liberality with which cargoes of food 
and clothing, a year or two afterwards, were des- 
patched to the relief of the Greeks. No legislative 
or executive measure was adopted at that time in 
consequence of Mr. Webster's motion and speech, — 
probably none was anticipated by him ; but no one 
who considers how much the march of events in 
such cases is influenced by the moral sentiments, 
will doubt that a great word like this, spoken in 
the American Congress, must have had no slight 
effect in cheering the heart of Greece, to persevere 
in her unequal but finally successful struggle. 

It was by these masterly parliamentary efforts that 
Mr. Webster left his mark on the age in which he 
lived. His fidelity to his convictions kept him for 



59 



the greater part of his life in a minority — a position 
which he regarded not as a proscription, but as a 
post of honor and duty. He felt that in free gov- 
ernments and in a normal state of parties, an oppo- 
sition is a political necessity, and that it has its 
duties not less responsible than those which attach 
to office. Before the importance of Mr. Webster's 
political services is disparaged for want of positive 
results, which can only be brought about by those 
who are clothed with power, it must be shown that 
to raise a persuasive and convincing voice in the 
vindication of truth and right, to uphold and assert 
the true principles of the government under which 
we live, and bring them home to the hearts of the 
people, to do this from a sense of patriotic duty, 
and without hope of the honors and emoluments of 
office, to do it so as to instruct the public con- 
science and warm the public heart, is a less merit- 
orious service to society, than to touch with skilful 
hand the springs of party politics, and to hold 
together the often discordant elements of ill-corn- 
pacted majorities. 

The greatest parliamentary effort made by Mr. 
Webster, was his second speech on Foote's resolu- 
tion, — the question at issue being nothing less than 
this : Is the Constitution of the United States a 
compact without a common umpire between con- 
federated sovereignties; or is it a government of 



f>0 



rhe people of the United States, sovereign within 
the sphere of its delegated powers, although reserv- 
ing a great mass of undelegated rights to the separate 
State governments and the people ? With those who 
embrace the opinions which Mr. Webster combated 
in this speech, this is not the time nor the place 
to engage in an argument ; but those who believe 
that he maintained the true principles of the Con- 
stitution, will probably agree, that since that instru- 
ment was communicated to the Continental Congress, 
seventy-two years ago this day, by George Washing- 
ton as President of the Federal Convention, no 
greater service has been rendered to the country 
than in the delivery of this speech. Well do I 
recollect the occasion and the scene. It was truly 
what Wellington called the battle of Waterloo, a 
conflict of giants. I passed an hour and a half with 
Mr. Webster, at his request, the evening before this 
great effort; and he went over to me, from a very 
concise brief, the main topics of the speech which 
he had prepared for the following clay. So calm 
and unimpassioned was the memorandum, so entirely 
was he at ease himself, that I was tempted to think, 
absurdly enough, that he was not sufficiently aware 
of the magnitude of the occasion. But I soon per- 
ceived that his calmness was the repose of conscious 
power. He was not only at ease, but sportive and 
full of anecdote ; and as he told the Senate play- 



6] 

fully the next day, he slept soundly that night on 
the formidable assault of his gallant and accom- 
plished adversary. So the great Conde slept on 
the eve of the battle of Rocroi; so Alexander slept 
on the eve of the battle of Arbela ; and so they 
awoke to deeds of immortal fame. As I saw him 
in the evening, (if I may borrow an illustration 
from his favorite amusement,) he was as uncon- 
cerned and as free of spirit, as some here have often 
seen him, while floating in his fishing boat along a 
hazy shore, gently rocking on the tranquil tide, 
dropping his line here and there, with the varying 
fortune of the sport. The next morning he was 
like some mighty Admiral, dark and terrible, casting 
the long shadow of his frowning tiers far over the 
sea, that seemed to sink beneath him ; his broad 
pendant streaming at the main, the stars and the 
stripes at the fore, the mizzen, and the peak ; and 
bearing down like a tempest upon his antagonist, 
with all his canvas strained to the wind, and all 
his thunders roaring from his broadsides. 

AS A JURIST. 

Mr. Webster's career was not less brilliant as n 
jurist than as a statesman. In fact, he possessed in 
an eminent degree, a judicial mind. While performing 
an amount of congressional and official labor sul- 



62 



ficient to fill the busiest day, and to task the strong- 
est powers, he yet sustained with a giant's strength, 
the Herculean toils of his profession. At the very 
commencement of his legal studies, resisting the 
fascination of a more liberal course of reading, he 
laid his foundations deep in the common law; grap- 
pled as well as he might with the weary subtleties 
and obsolete technicalities of Coke Littleton, and 
abstracted and translated volumes of reports from 
the Norman French and Latin. A few years of 
practice follow in the courts of New Hampshire, 
interrupted by his service in Congress for two polit- 
ical terms, and we find him at the bar of the Supreme 
Court of the United States at Washington, inaugu- 
rating in the Dartmouth College case, what may 
be called a new school of constitutional jurisprudence. 
It would be a waste of time to speak of that 
great case, or of Mr. Webster's connection with it. 
It is too freshly remembered in our tribunals. So 
novel at that time, were the principles involved in 
it, that a member of the Court, after a cursory 
inspection of the record in the case, expressed the 
opinion that little of importance could be urged in 
behalf of the plaintiff in error; but so firm is the 
basis on which, in that and subsequent cases of 
a similar character, those principles were established, 
that they form one of the best settled, as they are 



63 



one of the most important, portions of the consti- 
tutional law of the Union. 

Not less important, and, at the time, not less 
novel, were the principles involved in the celebrated 
case of Gibbons and Ogden. This case grew out 
of a grant by the State of New York to the 
assignees of Fulton, of the exclusive right to navi- 
gate by steam the rivers, harbors and bays of the 
Empire State. Twenty-five years afterwards, Mr. 
Justice Wayne gave to Mr. Webster the credit of 
having laid down the broad constitutional ground, 
on which the navigable waters of the United States, 
"every creek and river and lake and bay and 
harbor in the country," were forever rescued from 
the grasp of State monopoly. So foiled the inten- 
tion of the Legislature of New York to secure a 
rich pecuniary reward to the great perfecter of 
steam navigation; so must have failed any attempt 
to compensate by money the inestimable achieve- 
ment. Monopolies could not reward it; silver and 
gold could not weigh down its value. Small services 
are paid with money and place ; large ones with fame. 
Fulton had his reward, when, after twenty years 
of unsuccessful experiment and hope deferred, he 
made the passage to Albany by steam ; as Frank- 
lin had his reward when he saw the fibres of the 
cord which held his kite stiffening with the elec- 
tricity they had drawn from the thunder-cloud; 



64 



as Galileo had his when he pointed his little tube 
to the heavens and discovered the Medicean stars ; 
as Columbus had his when he beheld from the deck 
of his vessel a moving light on the shores of his 
new found world. That one glowing unutterable 
thrill of conscious success is too exquisite to be 
alloyed with baser metal. The midnight vigils, the 
aching eyes, the fainting hopes turned at last into 
one bewildering ecstasy of triumph, cannot be repaid 
with gold. The great discoveries, improvements and 
inventions which benefit mankind, can only be 
rewarded by opposition, obloquy, poverty, and an 
undying name. 

Time would fail me, were I otherwise equal to 
the task, to dwell on the other great constitutional 
cases argued by Mr. Webster; those on State 
insolvent laws, the Bank of the United States, 
the Sailor's Snug Harbor, the Charlestown Bridge 
Franchise, or those other great cases on the va- 
lidity of Mr. Girard's will, in which Mr. Webster's 
argument drew forth an emphatic acknowledgment 
from the citizens of Washington, of all denomina- 
tions, for its great value " in demonstrating the vital 
importance of Christianity to the success of our free 
institutions, and that the general diffusion of that 
argument among the people of the United States 
is a matter of deep public interest;" or the argu- 
ment of the Rhode Island charter case in 1848, 



65 



which attracted no little public notice in Europe 
at that anxious period, as a masterly discussion of 
the true principles of constitutional obligation. 

It would be superfluous, I might almost say im- 
pertinent, to remark, that if Mr. Webster stood at 
the head of the constitutional lawyers of the coun- 
try, he was not less distinguished in early and middle 
life, in the ordinary walks of the profession. From 
a very early period he shared the best practice with 
the most eminent of his profession. The trial of 
Goodridge in 1817, and of Knapp in 1829, are still 
recollected as specimens of the highest professional 
skill; the latter, in fact, as a case of historical im- 
portance in the criminal jurisprudence of the country. 

But, however distinguished his reputation in the 
other departments of his profession, his ftime as a 
jurist is mainly associated with the tribunals of the 
United States. The relation of the Federal Govern- 
ment to that of the States is peculiar to this country, 
and gives rise to a class of cases in the Supreme 
Court of the United States, to which there is noth- 
ing analogous in the jurisprudence of England. In 
that country nothing, not even the express words 
of a treaty, can be pleaded against an act of Par- 
liament. The Supreme Court of the United States 
entertains questions which involve the constitutionality 
of the laws of State legislatures, the validity of the 
decrees of State courts, nay of the constitutionality 






of acts of Congress itself Everv one feels that 
this range and elevation of jurisdiction must tend 
greatly to the respectability of practice at that 
forum, and give a breadth and liberality to the 
tone with which questions are there discussed, not 
so much to be looked for in the ordinary litigation 

■ _ 

of the common law. No one needs to be reminded 
how fullv Mr. Webster felt, and in his own relations 
to it. sustained the dismitv of this tribunaL He 
regarded it as :he great mediating power of the 
Constitution. He believed that while it commanded 
the confidence of the countrv. no serious derange- 
ment of anv of the other srreat functions of the 
_ eminent was to be apprehend e 3 ; if it should 
ever fail to do so. L : :ed the worst. For the 
memory of Marshall, the great and honored magris- 
trate who presided in this court for the third part 
of a century, and did so much to raise its reputa- 
tion and establish its intluence. he cherished feelings 
of veneration second only to tho-e which he bore 
the memorv of Wash in gton. 



- A DIPLOMATIST. 

In his political career Mr. Webster owed almost 
everything to popular choice, or the favor of the 
Legislature of Massachusetts. He was. however, twice 
clothed with executive power, as the head of an 



67 



Administration, and in that capacity achieved a diplo- 
matic success of the highest order. Among the 
victories of peace not less renowned than those of 
war which Milton celebrates, the first place is surely 
due to those friendly arrangements between great 
powers, by which war is averted. Such an arrange- 
ment was effected by Mr. Webster in 1842, in 
reference to more than one highly irritating question 
between this country and Great Britain, and especially 
the North-eastern Boundary of the United States. 
I allude to the subject, not for the sake of reopen- 
ing obsolete controversies, but for the purpose of 
vindicating his memory from the charges of clisin- 
genuousness and even fraud which were brought 
against him at the time in England, and which 
have very lately been revived in that country. I 
do it the rather as the facts of the case have never 
been fully stated. 

The North-eastern Boundary of the United States, 
which was described by the treaty of 1783, had 
never been surveyed and run. It was still unsettled 
in 1842, and had become the subject of a contro- 
versy which had resisted the ability of several suc- 
cessive administrations, on both sides of the water, 
and had nearly exhausted the resources of arbitration 
and diplomacy. Border collisions, though happily no 
bloodshed, had taken place ; seventeen regiments had 
been thrown into the British Provinces; General 



68 



Scott had been despatched to the frontier of Maine; 
and our Minister in London (Mr. Stevenson,) had 
written to the commander of the American squadron 
in the Mediterranean, that a war, in his opinion, was 
inevitable. 

Such was the state of things when Mr. Webster 
came into the Department of State in the spring 
of 1841. He immediately gave an intimation to the 
British government that he was desirous of renew- 
ing the interrupted negotiation. A change of min- 
istry took place in England, in the course of a few 
months, and a resolution was soon taken by Sir 
Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen, to send a special 
Envoy to the United States, to make a last attempt 
to settle this dangerous dispute by negotiation. 
Lord Ashburton was selected for this honorable 
errand, and his known friendly relations with Mr. 
Webster were among the motives that prompted 
his appointment. It may be observed that the in- 
trinsic difficulties of the negotiation were increased 
by the circumstance, that, as the disputed territory 
lay in the State of Maine, and the property of the 
soil was in Maine and Massachusetts, it was deemed 
necessary to obtain the consent of those States to 
any arrangement that might be entered into by 
the general government. 

The length of time for which the question had 
been controverted had, as usually happens in such 



69 



cases, had the effect of fixing both parties more 
firmly in their opposite views of the subject. It 
was a pledge at least of the good faith with which 
the United States had conducted the discussion, that 
everything in our archives bearing on the subject 
had been voluntarily spread before the world. On 
the other side, no part of the correspondence of 
the ministers who negotiated the treaty of 1783 had 
ever been published, and whenever Americans were 
permitted for literary purposes to institute historical 
inquiries in the public offices in London, precautions 
were taken to prevent anything from being brought 
to light, which might bear unfavorably on the Brit- 
ish interpretation of the treaty. 

The American interpretation of the treaty had 
been maintained in its fullest extent, as far as I 
am aware, by every statesman in the country, of 
whatever party, to whom the question had ever 
been submitted. It had been thus maintained in 
good faith by an entire generation of public men 
of the highest intelligence and most unquestioned 
probity. The British government had, with equal 
confidence, maintained their interpretation. The at- 
tempt to settle the controversy by a reference to 
the King of the Netherlands had failed. In this 
state of things, as the boundary had remained un- 
settled for fifty-nine years, and had been controverted 
for more than twenty; as negotiation and arbitra- 



70 

tion had shown that neither party was likely to 
convince the other; and as in cases of this kind 
it is more important that* a public controversy 
should be settled than how it should be settled, (of 
course within reasonable limits,) Mr. Webster had 
from the first contemplated a conventional line. 
Such a line, and for the same reasons, was antici- 
pated in Lord Ashburton's instructions, and was 
accordingly agreed upon by the two negotiators; — 
a line convenient and advantageous to both parties. 
Such an adjustment, however, like that which had 
been proposed by the King of the Netherlands, was 
extremely distasteful to the people of Maine, who, 
standing on their rights, adhered with the greatest 
tenacity to the boundary described by the treaty of 
1783, as the United States had always claimed it. 
As the opposition of Maine had prevented that ar- 
rangement from taking effect, there is great reason 
to suppose that it would have prevented the adoption 
of the conventional line agreed to by Mr. Webster 
and Lord Ashburton, but for the following circum- 
stance. 

This was the discovery, the year before, by Pres- 
ident Sparks, in the archives of the Bureau of 
Foreign Affairs, at Paris, of a copy of a small map 
of North America, by D'Anville, published in 1746, 
on which a red line was drawn, indicating a boun- 
dary between the United States and Great Britain 



71 



more favorable to the latter than she herself had 
claimed it, By whom it was marked, or for what 
purpose, did not appear, from any indication on 
the map itself. There was also found, in the 
Bureau of Foreign Affairs, in a bound volume of 
official correspondence, a letter from Dr. Franklin 
to the Count de Vergennes, dated on the 6th of De- 
cember, 1782, (six days after the signature of the 
provisional articles,) stating that in compliance with 
the Count's request, and on a map sent him for 
the purpose, he had marked, "with a strong red 
line, the limits of the United States, as settled in 
the preliminaries." 

The French archives had been searched by Mr. 
Canning's agents as long ago as 1827, but this 
map either escaped their notice, or had not been 
deemed by them of importance. The English and 
French maps of this region differ from each other, 
and it is known that the map used by the nego- 
tiators of the treaty of 1783, was Mitchell's large 
map of America, published under the official sanc- 
tion of the Board of Trade in 1754. D'Anville's 
map was but eighteen inches square ; and on so 
small a scale the difference of the two boundaries 
would be but slight, and consequently open to 
mistake. The letter of the Count de Vergennes, 
transmitting a map to be marked, is not preserved, 
nor is there any endorsement on the red-line map, 



72 



to show that it is the map sent by the Count and 
marked by Franklin. D'Anville's map was pub- 
lished in 1746, and it would surely be unwarrant- 
able to take for granted, in a case of such importance, 
that, in the course of thirty years, it could not have 
been marked with a red line, for some other pur- 
pose, and by some other person. It would be equally 
rash to assume as certain, either that the map 
marked by Franklin for the Count de Vergennes was 
deposited by him in the public archives ; or, that 
if so deposited, it may not be concealed among 
the sixty thousand maps contained in that deposi- 
tory. The official correspondence of Mr. Oswald, 
the British negotiator, was retained by the British 
minister in his own possession, and does not ap- 
pear ever to have gone into the public archives. 

In the absence of all evidence to connect Dr. 
Franklin's letter with the map, it could not, in a 
court of justice, have been received for a moment 
as a map marked by him ; and any presumption 
that it was so marked was resisted by the lan- 
guage of the treaty. This point was urged in 
debate, with great force, by Lord Brougham, who, as 
well as Sir Robert Peel, liberally defended Mr. 
Webster from the charges, which the opposition 
journals in London had brought against him. 

Information of this map was, in the progress of 
the negotiation, very properly communicated to Mr. 



73 



Webster by Mr. Sparks. For the reasons stated, it 
could not be admitted as proving anything. It was 
another piece of evidence of uncertain character, 
and Mr. Webster could have no assurance that 
the next day might not produce some other map 
equally strong or stronger on the American side ; 
which, as I shall presently state, was soon done in 
London. 

In this state of things, he made the only use of 
it, which could be legitimately made, in communi- 
cating it to the commissioners of the State of 
Maine and Massachusetts, and to the Senate, as a 
piece of conflicting evidence, entitled to considera- 
tion, likely to be urged as of great importance 
by the opposite party, if the discussion should be 
renewed, increasing the difficulties which already 
surrounded the question, and thus furnishing new 
grounds for agreeing to the proposed conventional 
line. No one, I think, acquainted with the history 
of the controversy, and the state of public opinion 
and feeling, can doubt that, but for this communi- 
cation, it would have been difficult, if not impos- 
sible, to procure the assent either of Maine or of 
the Senate to the treaty. 

This would seem to be going as far as reason 
or honor required, in reference to an unauthenti- 
cated document, having none of the properties of 
legal evidence, not exhibited by the opposite party, 

10 



74 



and of a nature to be outweighed by contradictory 
evidence of the same kind, which was very soon 
done. But Mr. Webster was at the time, severely 
censured by the opposition press in England, and 
was accused of "perfidy and want of good faith," 
(and this charge has lately been revived in an 
elaborate and circumstantial manner), for not going 
with this map to Lord Ashburton ; entirely aban- 
doning the American claim, and ceding the whole 
of the disputed territo^, more even than she asked, 
to Great Britain, on the strength of this single 
piece of doubtful evidence. 

Such a charge scarcely deserves an answer ; but 
two things will occur to all impartial persons, — 
one, that the red-line map, even had it been 
proved to have been marked by Franklin (which 
it is not), would be but one piece of evidence, 
to be weighed, with the words of the treaty, with 
all the other evidence in the case, and especially 
with the other maps; and, secondly, that such a 
course, as it is pretended that Mr. Webster ought 
to have pursued, could only be reasonably required 
of him, on condition that the British government 
had also produced, or would undertake to pro- 
duce, all the evidence, and especially all the 
maps in its possession, favorable to the American 
claim. 

Now, not to urge against the red-line map, that, 



75 

as was vigorously argued by Lord Brougham, it 
was at variance with the express words of the 
treaty, there were, according to Mr. Gallatin, the 
commissioner for preparing the claim of the United 
States, to be submitted to the arbiter in 1827, at 
least twelve maps, published in London, in the 
course of two years after the signature of the 
provisional articles in 1782, all of which give the 
boundary line precisely as claimed by the United 
States ; and no map was published in London, fa- 
voring the British claim, till the third year. The 
earliest of these maps were prepared to illustrate 
the debates in Parliament on the treaty ; or to 
illustrate the treaty in anticipation of the debate. 
None of the speakers on either side intimated that 
these maps are inaccurate, though some of the op- 
position speakers attacked the treaty as giving a 
disadvantageous boundary. One of these maps, that 
of Faden, the royal geographer, was stated on the 
face of it to be " drawn according to the treaty." Mr. 
Sparks is of opinion that Mr. Oswald, the British 
envoy by whom the treaty was negotiated, and 
who was in London when the earliest of the maps 
were engraved, was consulted by the map-makers 
on the subject of the boundary. At any rate, had 
they been inaccurate in this respect, either Mr. 
Oswald, or the minister, "who was vehemently as- 
sailed on account of the lan>;e concession of the 



7G 



boundaries," would have exposed the error. But 
neither by Mr. Oswald nor by any of the minis- 
ters was any complaint made of the inaccuracy of 
the maps. 

One of these maps was that contained in "Bew's 
Political Magazine," a respectable journal, for which 
it was prepared, to illustrate the debate on the 
provisional articles of 1782. It happened that Lord 
Ashburton was calling upon me, about the time 
of the debate in the House of Commons on the 
merits of the treaty, on the 21st of March, 1843. 
On my expressing to him the opinion, with the 
freedom warranted by our intimate friendly rela- 
tions, that his government ought to be much 
obliged to him, for obtaining so much of a terri- 
tory, of which I conscientiously believed the whole 
belonged to us, "What," asked he, "have you to 
oppose to the red-line map?" I replied that, in 
addition to the other objections already mentioned, 
I considered it to be outweighed by the numerous 
other maps which were published at London at 
the time, some of them to illustrate the treaty ; 
and, among them, I added, " the map in the vol- 
ume which happens to lie on my table at this 
moment," which was the volume of " Bew's Po- 
litical Magazine," to which I called his attention. He 
told me that he was unacquainted with that map, 
and desired that I would lend him the volume, to 
show to Sir Robert Peel. This I did, and in his 



77 



reply to Lord Palnierston, in the House of Com- 
mons, Sir Robert Peel, holding this volume of mine 
in his hand, referred to the map contained in it, 
and " which follows," said he, " exactly the Ameri- 
can line," as an offset to the red-line map, of which 
great use had been made by the opposition in Eng- 
land, for the purpose of showing that Lord Ash- 
burton had been overreached by Mr. Webster. In 
the course of his speech, he defended Mr. Webster 
in the handsomest manner, from the charges brought 
against him in reference to this map, by the oppo- 
sition press, and said that in his judgment "the 
reflections cast upon that most worthy and honor- 
able man are unjust." 

Nor was this all. The more effectually to remove 
the impression attempted to be raised, in consequence 
of the red-line map, that Lord Ashburton had been 
overreached, Sir Robert Peel stated, — and the disclosure 
was noiv for the first time made, — that there was, in the 
library of King George the Third, (which had been 
given to the British Museum by George the Fourth), 
a copy of Mitchell's map, in which the boundary as 
delineated " follows exactly the line claimed by the 
United States." On four places upon this line are 
written the words, in a strong, bold hand, "The 
boundary as described by Mr. Oswald." There is 
documentary proof that Mr. Oswald sent the map 
used by him in negotiating the treaty to King 
George the Third, for his information ; and Lord 



78 



Brougham stated in his place, in the House of Peers, 
that the words, four times repeated in different 
parts of the line, were, in his opinion, written by 
the king himself! Having listened, and of course 
with the deepest interest, to the debate in the House 
of Commons, I sought the earliest opportunity of 
inspecting the map, which was readily granted to 
me by Lord Aberdeen. The boundary is marked, in 
the most distinct and skilful manner, from the St. 
Croix all round to the St. Mary's, and is precisely 
that which has been always claimed by us. There is 
every reason to believe that this is the identical 
copy of Mitchell's map officially used by the nego- 
tiators, and sent by Mr. Oswald, as we learn from 
Dr. Franklin, to England. Sir Eobert Peel informed 
me that it was unknown to him till after the treaty ; 
and Lord Aberdeen and Lord Ashburton gave me 
the same assurance. It was well known, however, 
to the agent employed under Lord Melbourne's 
administration in maintaining the British claim, and 
who was foremost in vilifying Mr. Webster for con- 
cealing the reel-line map ! * 

* Sir Robert Peel, with reference to the line on Oswald's map, observes, 
" I do not say that that was the boundary, ultimately settled by the nego- 
tiators." Such, however, is certainly the case. Mr. Jay's copy of Mitchell's 
map (which was also discovered after the negotiation of the treaty), 
exhibits a line running down the St. John's to its mouth, and called " Mr. 
Oswald's line." This is the line which Mr. Oswald offered to the American 
negotiators on the 8th of October. It was, however, not approved by the 
British Government, and the line indicated in the map of King George the 
Third, as the " Boundary as described by Mr. Oswald," was finally 
agreed to. 



'9 



AS A PUBLIC SPEAKER. 

I had intended to say a few words on Mr. Web- 
ster's transcendent ability as a public speaker on 
the great national anniversaries, and the patriotic 
celebrations of the country. But it would be impos- 
sible, within the limits of a few paragraphs, to do 
any kind of justice to such efforts as the discourse 
on the twenty-second December, at Plymouth ; the 
speeches on the laying the corner-stone, and the 
completion of the Bunker Hill Monument ; the 
eulogy on Adams and Jefferson ; the character of 
Washington ; the discourse on laying the foun- 
dation of the extension of the Capitol. What 
gravity and significance in the topics, what rich- 
ness of illustration, what soundness of principle, 
what elevation of sentiment, what fervor in the 
patriotic appeals, what purity, vigor, and clearness 
in the style ! 

With reference to the first-named of these admir- 
able discourses, the elder President Adams declared 
that " Burke is no longer entitled to the praise — 
the most consummate orator of modern times." And 
it will, I think, be admitted by any one who shall 
attentively study them, that if Mr. Webster, with all 
his powers and all his attainments, had done nothing 
else but enrich the literature of the country with 



80 

these performances, he would be allowed to have 
lived not unworthily, nor in vain. When we con- 
sider that they were produced under the severe 
pressure of professional and official engagements, 
numerous and arduous enough to task even his 
intellect, we are lost in admiration of the affluence 
of his mental resources. 

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE AND MANNER. 

In all the speeches, arguments, discourses, and 
compositions of every kind proceeding from Mr. 
Webster's lips or pen, there were certain general 
characteristics which I am unwilling to dismiss without 
a passing allusion. Each, of course, had its peculiar 
merits, according to the nature and importance of 
the subject, and the care bestowed by Mr. Webster 
on the discussion ; but I find some general qualities 
pervading them all. One of them is the extreme 
sobriety of the tone, the pervading common sense, 
the entire absence of that extravagance and over- 
statement which are so apt to creep into political 
harangues, and discourses on patriotic anniversa- 
ries. His positions are taken strongly, clearly, and 
boldly, but without wordy amplification, or one-sided 
vehemence. You feel that your understanding is 
addressed, on behalf of a reasonable proposition, 
which rests neither on sentimental refinement or 



81 



rhetorical exaggeration. This is the case even in 
speeches like that on the Greek Revolution, where 
in enlisting the aid of classical memories and Christian 
sympathies, it was so difficult to rest within the 
bounds of moderation. 

This moderation not only characterizes Mr. Web- 
ster's parliamentary efforts, but is equally conspicuous 
in his discourses on popular and patriotic occasions, 
which, amidst all the inducements to barren declam- 
ation, are equally and always marked by the treatment 
of really important topics, in a manly and instructive 
strain of argument and reflection. 

Let it not be thought, however, that I would rep- 
resent Mr. Webster's speeches in Congress or else- 
where, as destitute, on proper occasions, of the most 
glowing appeals to the moral sentiments, or wanting, 
when the topic invites it, in any of the adornments 
of a magnificent rhetoric. Who that heard it, or has 
read it, will ever forget the desolating energy of his 
denunciation of the African slave trade, in the dis- 
course at Plymouth ; or the splendor of the apostrophe 
to Warren, in the first discourse on Bunker Hill ; or 
that to the monumental shaft and the survivors of 
the Revolution in the second; or the trumpet-tones 
of the speech placed in the lips of John Adams, in 
the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson; or the sublime 
peroration of the speech on Foot's resolution; or 

the lyric fire of the imagery by which he illustrates 

11 



82 



the extent of the British empire ; or the almost super- 
natural terror of his description of the force of con- 
science in the argument in Knapp's trial ? Then, how 
bright and fresh the description of Niagara! how 
beautiful the picture of the Morning, in his private 
correspondence, which, as well as his familiar conver- 
sation, were enlivened by the perpetual play of a 
joyous and fertile imagination! In a word, what 
tone in all the grand and melting music of our lan- 
guage is there, which is not heard in some portion 
of his speeches or writings ; while reason, sense, and 
truth compose the basis of the strain? Like the sky 
above us, it is sometimes serene and cloudless, and 
peace and love shine out from its starry depths. At 
other times the gallant streamers, in wild, fantastic 
play, — emerald, and rose, and orange, and fleecy 
white, 1 — shoot upward from the horizon, mingle in a 
fiery canopy at the zenith, and throw out their flick- 
ering curtains over the heavens and the earth ; while 
at other times the mustering tempest piles his lower- 
ing battlements on the sides of the north, a furious 
-torm-wind. rushes forth from their blazing loop-holes, 
and volleyed thunders give the signal of the elemental 
war! 

Another quality, which appears to me to be very 
conspicuous in all Mr. Webster's speeches, is the 
fairness and candor with Avhich he treats the argument 
of his opponent, and the total absence of offensive 



83 



personality. He was accustomed, in preparing to 
argue a question at the bar, or to debate it in the 
Senate, first to state his opponent's case or argument 
in his own mind, with as much force and skill as if it 
were his own view of the subject, not deeming it 
worthy of a statesman discussing the great issues of 
the public weal, to assail and prostrate a man of 
straw, and call it a victory over his antagonist. True 
to his party associations, there was the least possible 
mingling of the partisan in his parliamentary efforts. 
No one, I think, ever truly said of him, that he had 
either misrepresented or failed to grapple fairly with 
the argument which he undertook to confute. That 
he possessed the power of invective in the highest 
degree is well known, from the display of it on a few 
occasions, when great provocation justified and 
required it; but he habitually abstained from 
offensive personality, regarding it as an indication 
always of a bad temper, and generally of a weak 
cause. 

I notice, lastly, a sort of judicial dignity in Mr. 
Webster's mode of treating public questions, which 
may be ascribed to the high degree in which he 
united, in the range of his studies and the habits of 
his life, the jurist with the statesman. There were 
occasions, and those not a few, when, but for the 
locality from which he spoke, you might have been 
at a loss, whether you were listening to the accom- 



84 

plished senator unfolding the principles of the Con- 
stitution as a system of government, or the consum- 
mate jurist applying its legislative provisions to the 
practical interests of life. In the Dartmouth College 
case, and that of Gibbons and Ogden, the dryness of 
a professional argument is forgotten in the breadth 
and elevation of the constitutional principles shown 
to be involved in the issue; while in the great 
speeches on the interpretation of the Constitution, a 
severe judicial logic darts its sunbeams into the 
deepest recesses of a written compact of government, 
intended to work out a harmonious adjustment of the 
antagonistic principles of federal and state sovereignty. 
None, I think, but a great statesman could have 
performed Mr. Webster's part before the highest 
tribunals of the land ; none but a great lawyer could 
have sustained himself as he did on the floor of the 
Senate. In fact, he rose to that elevation at which 
the law, in its highest conception, and in its versatile 
functions and agencies, as the great mediator between 
the state and the individual ; the shield by which the 
weakness of the single man is protected from the 
violence and craft of his fellows, and clothed for the 
defence of his rights with the mighty power of the 
mass; which watches, faithful guardian, over the life 
and property of the orphan in the cradle ; spreads the 
tvgis of the public peace alike over the crowded streets 
of great cities and the solitary pathways of the wil- 



85 

derness; which convoys the merchant and his cargo 
in safety to and from the ends of the earth ; prescribes 
the gentle humanities of civilization to contending 
armies; sits serene umpire of the clashing interests 
of confederated states, and moulds them all into one 
grand union; — I say Mr. Webster rose to an elevation 
at which all these attributes and functions of universal 
] aw , — in action alternately executive, legislative, and 
judicial ; in form successively constitution, statute, and 
decree, — are mingled into one harmonious, protecting, 
strengthening, vitalizing, sublime system; brightest 
image on earth of that ineffable Sovereign Energy, 
which, with mingled power, wisdom, and love, upholds 
and governs the universe. 

THE CENTRAL IDEA OF HIS POLITICAL SYSTEM. 

Led equally by his professional occupations and 
his political duties to make the Constitution the 
object of his profoundest study and meditation, he 
regarded it, with peculiar reverence, as a Covenant 
of Union between the members of this great and 
increasing family of States; and in that respect he 
considered it as the most important document ever 
penned by the hand of uninspired man. I need 
not tell you that this reverence for the Constitu- 
tion as the covenant of union between the States 
was the central idea of his political system, which, 



86 

however, in this, as in all other respects, aimed at 
a wise and safe balance of extreme opinions. He 
valued, as much as any man can possibly value it, 
the principle of State sovereignty. He looked upon 
the organization of these separate independent re- 
publics — of different sizes, different ages and histories, 
different geographical positions, and local interests, 
as furnishing a security of inappreciable value for 
a wise and beneficent administration of local affairs, 
and the protection of individual and local rights. 
But he regarded as an approach to the perfection 
of political wisdom, the moulding of these separate 
and independent sovereignties, with all their pride 
of individual right and all their jealousy of indi- 
vidual consequence, into a well-compacted whole. 
He never weighed the two principles against each 
other; he held them complemental to each other, 
equally and supremely vital and essential. 

I happened, one bright starry night, to be walk- 
ing home with him at a late hour, from the Capitol 
at Washington, after a skirmishing debate, in which 
he had been speaking, at no great length, but with 
much earnestness and warmth, on the subject of the 
Constitution as forming a united government. The 
planet Jupiter, shining with unusual brilliancy, was 
in full view. He paused as we descended Capitol 
Hill, and unconsciously pursuing the train of thought 
which he had been enforcing in the Senate, pointed 



87 



to the planet and said, — "'Night unto night show- 
eth knowledge;' take away the independent force, 
emanating from the hand of the Supreme, which 
impels that planet onward, and it would plunge in 
hideous ruin from those beautiful skies into the 
sun ; take away the central attraction of the sun, 
and the attendant planet would shoot madly from 
its sphere ; urged and restrained by the balanced 
forces, it wheels its eternal circles through the 
heavens." 



HE CONTEMPLATES A WORK ON THE CONSTITUTION. 

His reverence for the Constitution led him to 
meditate a work in which the history of its forma- 
tion and adoption should be traced, its principles 
unfolded and explained, its analogies with other 
governments investigated, its expansive fitness to 
promote the prosperity of the country for ages yet 
to come developed and maintained. His thoughts 
had long flowed in this channel. The subject was 
not only the one on which he had bestowed his 
most earnest parliamentary efforts; but it formed 
the point of reference of much of his historical and 
miscellaneous reading. He was anxious to learn win I 
the experience of mankind taught on the subject of 
governments, in any degree resembling our own. As 
our fathers, in forming the Confederation, and still 



88 



more the members of the Convention which framed 
the Constitution, and especially Washington, studied 
with diligence the organization of all the former 
compacts of government, — those of the Netherlands, 
of Switzerland, and ancient Greece, — so Mr. Webster 
directed special attention to all the former leagues 
and confederacies of modern and ancient times, for 
lessons and analogies of encouragement and warning 
to his countrymen. He dwelt much on the Amphic- 
tyonic league of Greece, one of the confederacies to 
which the framers of the Constitution often referred, 
and which is frequently spoken of as a species of 
federal government. Unhappily for Greece, it had 
little claim to that character. Founded originally 
on a confraternity of religious rites, it was expanded 
in the lapse of time into a loose political associa- 
tion, but was destitute of all the powers of an 
organized efficient government. On this subject Mr. 
Webster found a remark in Grote's History of 
Greece, which struck him as being of extreme sig- 
nificance to the people of the United States. Occa- 
sionally, says Grote, "there was a partial pretence 
for the imposing title bestowed upon the Aniphic- 
tyonic league by Cicero, 'Commune Gra?cia3 Concil- 
ium,' but we should completely misinterpret Grecian 
history, if we regarded it as a federal council habit- 
ually directing, or habitually obeyed." "And now," 
said Mr. Webster, "comes a passage, which ought 



80 



to be written in letters of gold over the door of 
the Capitol * and of every State Legislature : ' Had 
there existed any such "Commune Concilium" of 
tolerable wisdom and patriotism, and had the ten- 
dencies of the Hellenic mind been capable of adapting 
themselves to it, the whole course of later Grecian 
history would probably have been altered; the Mace- 
donian kings would have remained only as respectable 
neighbors, borrowing their civilization from Greece, 
and exercising their military energies upon Thracians 
and Illyrians; while united Hellas might have main- 
tained her own territory against the conquering 
legions of Rome.' " * A wise and patriotic federal 
government would have preserved Greece from the 
Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legions ! 

Professional and official labors engrossed Mr. Web- 
ster's time, and left him no leisure for the execu- 
tion of his meditated work on the Constitution, — 
a theme which, as he would have treated it, tracing 
it back to its historical fountains, and forward to 
its prophetical issues, seems to me, in the wide range 
of its topics, to embrace higher and richer elements 
of thought, for the American statesman and patriot, 
than any other not directly connected with the 
spiritual welfare of man. 

* Grote's History of Greece. Vol. II. p. 336. 
12 



90 



MAGNITUDE OF THE THEME. THE FUTURE OF THE UNION. 

What else is there, in the material system of the 
world, so wonderful as this concealment of the 
Western Hemisphere for ages behind the mighty 
veil of waters? How could such a secret be kept 
from the foundation of the world till the end of 
the fifteenth century ? What so astonishing as the 
concurrence, within less than a century, of the in- 
vention of printing, the demonstration of the true 
system of the heavens, and this great world-discov- 
ery ? What so mysterious as the dissociation of the 
native tribes of this continent from the civilized 
and civilizable races of men? What so remarkable, 
in political history, as the operation of the influences, 
now in conflict, now in harmony, under which the 
various nations of the Old World sent their children 
to occupy the New : great populations silently steal- 
ing into existence ; the wilderness of one century 
swarming in the next with millions, — ascendmg the 
streams, crossing the mountains, struggling with a 
wild, hard nature, with savage foes, with rival settle- 
ments of foreign powers, but ever onward, onward ? 
What so propitious as this long colonial training 
in the school of chartered government? And then, 
when the fulness of time had come, what so ma- 
jestic, amidst all its vicissitudes, and all its trials, as 



91 



the Grand Separation, — mutually beneficial, in its 
final results, to both parties, — the dread appeal to 
arms, that venerable Continental Congress, the august 
Declaration, the strange alliance of the oldest mon- 
archy of Europe with the infant Republic? And, 
lastly, what so worthy the admiration of men and 
angels, as the appearance of him the expected, him 
the hero, raised up to conduct the momentous con- 
flict to its auspicious issue in the Confederation, the 
Union, the Constitution? 

Is this a theme not unworthy of the pen and the 
mind of Webster ? Then consider the growth of the 
country, thus politically ushered into existence and 
organized under that Constitution, as delineated in 
his address on the laying the corner-stone of the 
extension of the Capitol, — the thirteen colonies that 
accomplished the revolution multiplied to thirty-three 
independent States, a single one of them exceeding 
in population the old thirteen ; the narrow border of 
settlement along the coast, fenced in by France and 
the native tribes, expanded to the dimensions of the 
continent; Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, 
California, Oregon, — territories equal to the great 
monarchies of Europe — added to the Union; and 
the two millions of population which warmed the im- 
agination of Burke, swelled to twenty-four millions, 
during the lifetime of Mr. Webster, and in seven 
short years, which have since elapsed, increased to 
thirty ! 



92 



With these stupendous results in his own time as 
the unit of calculation ; beholding under Providence 
with each decade of years a new people, millions 
strong, emigrants in part from the old world, but 
mainly bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, the 
children of the soil, growing up to inhabit the waste 
places of the continent, to inherit and transmit the 
rights and blessings which we have received from 
our fathers ; recognizing in the Constitution and in 
the Union established by it the creative influence 
which, as far as human agencies go, has wrought 
these miracles of growth and progress, and which 
wraps up in sacred reserve the expansive energy 
with which the work is to be carried on and per- 
fected, — he looked forward with patriotic aspiration 
to the time when, beneath its aegis, the whole wealth 
of our civilization would be poured out, not only to 
fill up the broad interstices of settlement, if I may 
so express myself, in the old thirteen and their 
young and thriving sister States, already organized 
in the West, but, in the lapse of time to found a 
hundred new republics in the valley of the Missouri 
and beyond the Rocky Mountains, till our letters 
and our arts, our schools and our churches, our laws 
and our liberties, shall be carried from the Arctic 
circle to the tropics; "from the rising of the sun to 
the going down thereof." 



93 



VIEWS OF THE PRESENT. 



This prophetic glance, not merely at the impending, 
but the distant futute, this reliance on the fulfilment 
of the great design of Providence, illustrated through 
our whole history, to lavish upon the people of this 
country the accumulated blessings of all former 
stages of human progress, made him more tolerant 
of the tardy and irregular advances and temporary 
wanderings from the path of what he deemed a wise 
and sound policy, than those fervid spirits, who dwell 
exclusively in the present, and make less allowance 
for the gradual operation of moral influences. This 
was the case in reference to the great sectional 
controversy, which now so sharply divides and so 
violently agitates the country. He not only confi- 
dently anticipated, what the lapse of seven years 
since his decease has witnessed and is witnessing, 
that the newly acquired and the newly organized 
territories of the Union would grow up into free 
States ; but, in common with all, or nearly all, the 
statesmen of the last generation, he believed that 
free labor would ultimately prevail throughout the 
country. He thought he saw that, in the operation 
of the same causes which have produced this result 
in the Middle and Eastern States, it was visibly 
taking place in the States north of the cotton-growing 
region ; and he inclined to the opinion that there 



94 



also, under the influence of physical and economical 
causes, free labor would eventually be found most 
productive, and would, therefore, be ultimately estab- 
lished. 

For these reasons, bearing hi mind what all admit, 
that the complete solution of the mighty problem 
which now so greatly tasks the prudence and pat- 
riotism of the wisest and best in the land, is beyond 
the delegated powers of the general government; 
that it depends, as far as the States are concerned, 
on their independent legislation, and that it is, of 
all others, a subject in reference to which public 
opinion and public sentiment will most powerfully 
influence the law; that much in the lapse of time, 
without law, is likely to be brought about by degrees, 
and gradually done and permitted, as in Missouri at 
the present day, while nothing is to be hoped from 
external interference, whether of exhortation or 
rebuke ; that in all human affairs controlled by self- 
governing communities, extreme opinions and extreme 
courses, on the one hand, generally lead to extreme 
opinions and extreme courses on the other ; and 
that nothing will more contribute to the earliest 
practicable relief of the country from this most pro- 
lific source of conflict and estrangement, than to 
prevent its being introduced into our party organ- 
izations, — he deprecated its being allowed to find 
a place among the political issues of the day, north 



95 

or south ; and seeking a platform on which honest 
and patriotic men might meet and stand, he thought 
he had found it, where our fathers did, in the Con- 
stitution. 

It is true, that in interpreting the fundamental 
law on this subject, a diversity of opinion between 
the two sections of the Union presents itself. This 
has ever been the case, first or last, in relation to 
every great question that has divided the country. 
It is the unfailing incident of constitutions, written 
or unwritten ; an evil to be dealt with in good faith, 
by prudent and enlightened men in both sections 
of the Union, seeking, as Washington sought, the 
public good, and giving expression to the patriotic 
common sense of the people. 

Such, I have reason to believe, were the principles 
entertained by Mr. Webster; not certainly those 
best calculated to win a temporary popularity in 
any part of the Union, in times of passionate sectional 
agitation, which, between the extremes of opinion, 
leaves no middle ground for moderate counsels. If 
any one could have found, and could have trodden 
such ground with success, he would seem to have 
been qualified to do it, by his transcendent talent, 
his mature experience, his approved temper and 
calmness, and his tried patriotism. If he failed of 
finding such a path for himself or the country, — 
while we thoughtfully await what time and an all- 



96 



wise Providence has in store for ourselves and our 
children, — let us remember that his attempt was 
the highest and the purest which can engage the 
thoughts of a statesman and a patriot, — peace on 
earth, good will toward men ; harmony and broth- 
erly love among the children of our common 
country. 

And oh, my friends ! if among those, who, dif- 
fering from him on this or any other subject, have 
yet, with generous forgetfulness of that which sep- 
arated you, and kindly remembrance of all you held 
in common, come up this day to do honor to his 
memory, there are any who suppose that he cher- 
ished less tenderly than yourselves the great ideas 
of Liberty, Humanity, and Brotherhood ; that because 
he was faithful to the duties which he inferred from 
the Constitution and the Law, to which he looked 
for the government of civil society, he was less 
sensible than yourselves to the broader relations 
and deeper sympathies which unite us to our fellow- 
creatures, as brethren of one family, and children 
of one Heavenly Father, — believe me, you do his 
memory a grievous wrong. 

PERSONAL CHARACTER. 

This is not the occasion to dwell upon the per- 
sonal character of Mr. Webster, on the fascination 



97 



of his social intercourse, or the charm of his domestic 
life. Something I could have said on his compan- 
ionable disposition and habits, his genial temper, 
the resources and attractions of his conversation, his 
love of nature, alike in her wild and cultivated 
aspects, and his keen perception of the beauties of 
this fair world in which we live ; something of his 
devotion to agricultural pursuits, which, next to his 
professional and public duties, formed the occupation 
of his life ; something of his fondness for athletic 
and manly sports and exercises; something of his 
friendships, and of his attachments closer than 
friendships, — the son, the brother, the husband, and 
the father; something of the joys and sorrows of 
his home; of the strength of his religious convictions, 
his testimony to the truth of the Christian revela- 
tion ; the tenderness and sublimity of the parting 
scene. Something on these topics I have elsewhere 
said, and may not here repeat. 

Some other things, my friends, with your indul- 
gence, standing here to perform this last office to his 
memory, 1 would say ; thoughts, memories, which 
crowd upon me, — too vivid to be repressed, too 
personal, ahnost, to be uttered. 

On the 17th of July, 1804, a young man from 
New Hampshire arrived in Boston, all but penniless, 
and all hut friendless. He was twenty-two years of 
age, and had come to take the first steps in the 

13 



98 



career of life at the capital of New England. Three 
days after arriving in Boston, he presented himself, 
without letters of recommendation, to Mr. Christo- 
pher Gore, then just returned from England, after 
an official residence of some years, and solicited a 
place in his office, as a clerk. His only introduction 
was hy a young man as little known to Mr. Gore 
as himself, and who went to pronounce his name, 
which he did so indistinctly as not to be heard. 
His slender figure, striking countenance, large dark 
eye, and massy brow, his general appearance indicat- 
ing a delicate organization,* his manly carriage and 
modest demeanor, arrested attention and inspired 
confidence. His humble suit was granted, he was 
received into the office, and had been there a week 
before Mr. Gore learned that his name was Daniel 
Webster! His older brother, — older in years, but 
later in entering life, — (for whose education Daniel, 
while teacher of the Academy at Fryeburg, had 
drudged till midnight in the office of the Register 
of Deeds), at that time taught a small school in 
Short street (now Kingston street), in Boston; and 
while he was in attendance at the commencement 
at Dartmouth, in 1804, to receive his degree, Daniel 
supplied his place. At that school, at the age of 
ten, 1 was then a pupil, and there commenced a 

* Description by Mrs. Eliza Biiekminstcr Lee, " Webster's Private Cor- 
respondence," i. 438. 



99 



friendship which lasted, without interruption, or chill, 
while his life lasted ; of which, while mine lasts, the 
grateful recollection will never perish. From that 
time forward, I knew, and as I knew, I respected, I 
honored, I loved him. I saw him at all seasons and 
on all occasions, in the flush of public triumph, in 
the intimacy of the fireside, in the most unreserved 
interchange of personal confidence ; in health and in 
sickness, in sorrow and in joy ; when early honors 
began to wreathe his brow, and in after-life through 
most of the important scenes of his public career. I 
saw him on occasions that show the manly strength, 
and, what is better, the manly weakness of the human 
heart ; and I declare this day, in the presence of 
Heaven and of men, that I never heard from him 
the expression of a wish unbecoming a good citizen 
and a patriot, — the utterance of a word unworthy 
a gentleman and a Christian; that I never knew 
a more generous spirit, a safer adviser, a warmer 
friend. 

Do vou ask me if he had faults ? I answer, he 
was a man. Do you again ask me the question? 
Look in your own breast, and get the answer there. 
Do you still insist on explicit information ? Let me 
give it to you, my immaculate friend, in the words 
which were spoken eighteen hundred years ago to 
certain who trusted in themselves that they were 
righteous and despised others : — 



100 



Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a 
Pharisee, and the other a publican. 

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself: God, I 
thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, 
adulterers, or even as this publican. 

I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. 

And the publican standing afar oif, would not lift up so much 
as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, 
God, be merciful to me a sinner. 

I tell you, This man went down to his house justified rather 
than the other. 

Yes, he had some of the faults of a lofty spirit, 
a genial temperament, an open hand, and a warm 
heart; he had none of the faults of a grovelling, 
mean, and malignant nature. He had especially the 
"last infirmity of noble mind," and had no doubt 
raised an aspiring eye to the highest object of 
political ambition. But he did it in the honest 
pride of a capacity equal to the station, and with 
a consciousness that he should reflect back the honor 
which it conferred. He might say, with Burke, that 
"he had no arts but honest arts;" and if he sought 
the highest honors of the state, he did it by unsur- 
passed talent, laborious service, and patriotic devotion 
to the public good. 

It was not given to him, any more than to the 
other members of the great triumvirate with whom 
his name is habitually associated, to attain the object 
of their ambition ; but posterity will do them justice, 
and begins already to discharge the debt of respect 
and gratitude. A noble mausoleum in honor of Clay, 



101 



and his statue by Hart, are in progress ; the statue 
of Calhoun, by Powers, adorns the Court House 
in Charleston, and a magnificent monument to his 
memory is in preparation ; and we present you this 
clay, fellow-citizens, the Statue of Webster, in enduring 
bronze, on a pedestal of granite from his native State, 
the noble countenance modelled from life, at the 
meridian of his days and his fame, and to his own 
satisfaction, and his person reproduced, from faithful 
recollection, by the oldest and most distinguished 
of the living artists of the country. He sleeps by 
the multitudinous ocean, which he himself so much 
resembled, in its mighty movement and its mighty 
repose; but his monumental form shall henceforward 
stand sentry at the portals of the Capitol, — the 
right hand* pointing to that symbol of the Union on 
which the left reposes, and his imperial gaze directed, 
with the hopes of the country, to the boundless 
West. In a few short years, we, whose eyes have 
rested on his majestic person, whose ears have drunk 
hi the music of his clarion voice, shall have gone to 
our rest ; but our children, for ages to come, as they 
dwell with awe-struck gaze upon the monumental 
bronze, shall say, Oh that we could have seen, oh 
that we could have heard, the great original ! 

Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago, this day, 
our beloved city received, from the General Court of 
the Colony, the honored name of Boston. On the 



102 



lono- roll of those whom she has welcomed to her 
nurturing bosom, is there a name which shines 
with a brighter lustre than his? Seventy-two years 
ago, this day, the Constitution of the United States 
was tendered to the acceptance of the people by 
George Washington. Who, of all the gifted and pair 
riotic of the land, that have adorned the interval, has 
done more to unfold its principles, maintain its 
purity, and to promote its duration? 

Here, then, beneath the walls of the Capitol of old 
Massachusetts; here, within the sight of those fair 
New England villages ; here, in the near vicinity of 
the graves of those who planted the germs of all 
this palmy growth ; here, within the sound of sacred 
bells ; here, in the presence of this vast multitude, — 
we raise this monument, with loving hearts, to the 
Statesman, the Patriot, the Fellow-Citizen, the neigh- 
bor, the friend. Long may it guard the approach to 
our halls of council! long may it look out upon a 
prosperous, a happy, and a united country! and, if 
days of trial and disaster should come, and the arm 
of flesh should fail, doubt not that the monumental 
form would descend from its pedestal, to stand in the 
front rank of the peril, and the bronze lips repeat 
the cry of the living voice, — "Liberty and Union, 
now and forever, one and inseparable." 



REPETITION OF THE FOREGOING EULOGY. 



On motion of Hon. E. G. Parker, in the Senate of Massachusetts, the following order 
was adopted, inviting a repetition, in the presence of the two Houses, of the foregoing 
Eulogy. 

Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

State House, Senate Chamber. ) 
Boston, Sept. 19, 1859. ) 

Ordered, That the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Rep- 
resentative* be requested, in behalf of the Legislature, to invite the Honorable Edward 
Everett to deliver bis oration on the inauguration of the Statue ot Darnel Webster, 
before the Legislature of the Commonwealth, in the grounds of the Capitol, on Wed- 
nesday next, at 3 o'clock P. M., or at such time as may suit his convenience. 
Sent down for concurrence. 

(Copy.) House °f Representatives, Sept. 19, 1859. 

C0 " CUrred - WILLIAM STOWE, Cleric. 

To this invitation the following answer was returned by Mr. Everett: 

Boston, Sept. 19, 1859. 
Hon. C. A. Phelps, President of the Senate, and Hon. Charles Hale, Speaker of 

the House of Representatives. 
Gentlemen :-I have received the copy of a Resolution passed this day, by the 
two Houses in concurrence, requesting me, through their presiding officers to deliver 
before the Legislature, in the Capitol grounds, my oration on the inauguration of the 

^wulaSd^grelt pleasure to comply with the wishes of the Legislature on 

Thursday next, at 3 o'clock P. M., and I beg leave, through you, to express to them 
mv grateful sense of the honor done me, by their invitation. 

I remain, gentlemen, with the highest res P eC ^J/^VERETT. 

The weather proved unfavorable on the day first appointed, and on several succes- 
sive days At length on Tuesday the 27th, in a remarkably propitious state of the 
weather and in the presence of an immense multitude, the repetition took place. 
The members of the Executive and Legislature having been seated on the spacious 
platform, erected in front of the principal entrance of the State House, Mr. Everett 
was introduced by the Committee of Arrangements, and by their Chairman, Hon. E. 
G Parker, of the Senate, presented to the presiding officer of that body, Hon. C. A. 
Phelps, in the following terms: 

Mr President: -As Chairman of the Committee of Arrangements. I have to 
introduce "ovou the orator of this occasion. He has been mvited I, the Legislating 
t, , deliver his' address inaugurating the statue of Daniel Webster before them He ,, 
here, prepared to address you. 1 need not introduce him to you; 1 have but to name 
the Hon. Edward Everett. 

Mr. Everett was then introduced to the members of the two Houses by Hon. 0. A. 
Phelps, President of the Senate, in the following brief address : 



104 



Gentlemen of the Senate and House of Representatives: 

The two branches of the Legislature have assembled in conformity with a vote 
passed on the 19th inst., to listen to an oration on the inauguration of the statue of 
Daniel Webster. 

No official action of ours was necessary to perpetuate the fame of Webster. Rut 
our predecessors of a former generation invoked the eloquence of Adams to give utter- 
ance to their then recent sorrow on the death of the beloved and illustrious Washing- 
ton, and those of a more recent day invited our distinguished fellow-citizen, who is 
about to address us, to speak to them of the life and character of John Quincy Adams. 

In obedience to this high example, it has seemed eminently fit and proper that to- 
day in the portals of the Capitol, we should honor the memory of one whose name and 
fame must be forever associated with the historic glories of our beloved Common- 
wealth. I have now the pleasure of presenting to you the Honorable Edward Everett. 

To this address, Mr. Everett replied in the following manner: 

Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Senate and of the House of Representatives : 

In rising to repeat, in your presence and at your request, the discourse prepared for 
the dedication of the statue of Daniel Webster, my first duty is one of grateful 
acknowledgment. I esteem it a very distinguished honor to have received an invita- 
tion of this kind and for the second time. When, eleven years ago, one of the most 
illustrious of the native sons of Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, was, in the Cap- 
itol at Washington, stricken down by the last enemy, before whom he quailed as little 
as he ever did before the face of human adversary, I was unanimously requested, by 
the two Houses, to speak for them on the melancholy occasion, in Faneuil Hall. You 
have now called upon me, under unusual circumstances, demanding my wannest 
thanks, to repeat the eulogy lately delivered by me on the most distinguished of the 
adopted sons of Massachusetts, under the auspices of her Legislature; on such a ros- 
trum as speaker never trod before; in the presence of this magnificent audience; and 
beneath the arch of these favoring heavens. I stand before you almost subdued by 
the grandeur of the scene. Deeply penetrated with a sense of my inability to do full 
justice to either of these occasions, I may yet account it a very signal honor and hap- 
piness of my life, that, having enjoyed to the last the friendship of each of these great 
men, and having acted in harmony with them on many important public occasions, I 
have been permitted, by the repeated call of the Legislature of Massachusetts, to pay 
the last funeral and monumental honors to their memory, and to connect my humble 
name with theirs, in these public services of respectful and grateful commemoration. 

Mr. Everett then repeated the address as delivered in the Music Hall on the 17th 
instant. On both occasions, about one-half of the Eulogy, as published in the Satur- 
day Evening Gazette of the 17th instant, was necessarily omitted, on account of its 
length. On the occasion of the Repetition in the Public Grounds, the entire passage 
headed " Mr. Webster as a Diplomatist," was also, for the same reason, omitted. The 
manuscript having been in the printer's hands a week before its delivery, a few pas- 
sages of the Eulogy, as spoken, are wanting in the newspaper editions. They are 
found, in their places, in the preceding pages. 

Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

In Senate, Oct. 8, 1859. 
Ordered, That the thanks of the Legislature be tendered to the Hon. Edward 
Everett for his Address, dedicating the Statue of Daniel Webster, delivered before 
them, on the 27th of September, in compliance with their request. 

Sent down for concurrence. S. N. GIFFORD, Clerk. 

House of Representatives, Oct. 10, 1859. 
Concurred. 

(Signed) WILLIAM STOWE, Clerk. 



LB D '05 



4- 






Q2> 



INAUGURATION 



STATUE 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 



SEPTEMBER 17, 1859. 



BOSTON: 
GEO. C RAND AND AVEEY, CITY PRINTERS, 

NO. 3.COSNHI1L. 

1859. 






c 






